Salome

For more than two decades, American soprano Patricia Racette has been an audience favorite, offering memorable performances as some of the most beloved heroines of the operatic repertoire. In this performance, she debuts a new role for the Met, baring all as the title princess of Richard Strauss’s shocking early masterpiece. It is a tour-de-force performance throughout, from her attempted seduction of the pious Jochanaan—sung with vigor by baritone Željko Lučić—to the catastrophic final scene. In his debut run with the company, conductor Joahannes Debus leads the Met Orchestra in one of opera’s most exhilarating scores, with a cast that also includes Gerhard Siegel as the leering Kind Herod and Nancy Fabiola Herrera as his manipulative wife, Herodias.