'High-concept' Met 'Tosca' booed

The Metropolitan Opera launched its new season with a production of Puccini's "Tosca" by the Swiss director Luc Bondy, whose "high-concept staging featured stark, spare, cold sets," replacing a lavishly decorous old production by Franco Zeffirelli. Bondy seemed to be "looking for every pretense to flesh out, literally, the eroticism of the lovers and the lecherous kinkiness of Scarpia," Anthony Tommasini writes in The New York Times. The opening-night audience did not approve:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/music/23tosca.html?hp