Sampson was a featured artist in American Opera Projects’ Composers and the Voice program, appeared on OPERA America’s Creators in Concert featuring the music of Tobias Picker, performed Santuzza with Opera at Florham, appeared as a featured soloist on the NYCO Renaissance Gala concert celebrating the life of the late Julius Rudel and performed in concert throughout the East Coast. A recent recipient of a grant from the Olga Forrai foundation, her upcoming engagements include Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana at Fondazione Teatro Goldoni in Livorno, the title role in Madama Butterfly at Teatro del Giglio in Lucca, and concert appearances in Italy and the U.S.

Other positives: the Kansas City Symphony was electrifying, the lighting was excellent and the informal banter among patrons in the peanut gallery was refreshing.Praised by The New York Times as a “plush-voiced soprano” Kristin Sampson (Tosca) began the 2015-16 season with a debut at Potenza’s Teatro Francesco Stabile as Mimi in La bohème. Only Marina Costa-Jackson’s turn in the title role didn’t disappoint me last night. Having seen Luciano Pavarotti play the ill-fated painter Mario Cavaradossiin in two filmed productions of “Tosca,” my standards are now unreasonably high.

When I finish watching the Hungarian State Opera’s mesmerizing new four-hour rendering of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal,” I’ll have taken in 303 online operas in the past two years. I immersed myself in the form during the pandemic. As documented extensively at this site, I came to opera late in life. “Tosca” was the first professional opera I’d experienced in-person since 2019. The Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s production rattled me. After witnessing scenes of torture, attempted rape, murder and suicide in Giacomo Puccini’s provocatively melodramatic 1900 opera “Tosca,” two perfectly behaved little girls in matching dresses and their doting parents walked out of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts as if they’d just taken in a showing of Disney on Ice. I didn’t know what to make of the lovely family seated near me in the cheap seats of Kansas City’s splashy opera house on Friday, May 7.

Tosca opera kc