Sarasota Opera’s Women of the Season

By Scott Ferguson | February 2023

When Sarasota Opera’s Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Victor DeRenzi and General Director Richard Russell were planning the company’s 2024 Winter Opera Festival, their goal was to strike a balance between perennial favorites and operas that are less frequently performed. 

Mission accomplished — the season includes two of the art form’s most popular works, Georges Bizet’s Carmen (Feb. 17-March 22, 2024) and Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor (Feb. 24-March 23, 2024), as well as Giuseppe Verdi’s Luisa Miller (March 9-24, 2024). The characters and the operas themselves reflect the times and the societies in which they were created, 19^th century Europe. 

“Carmen is a very strong-willed woman,” Russell says. “She knows her mind and is absolutely in control of her life, even if it leads her down a bad path. Lucia is the opposite. She’s in love with a man, but she’s controlled by her brother, who forces her to marry somebody she doesn’t love and she loses her reason because of it.”

DeRenzi adds, “And Luisa Miller is at the mercy of the political system of the time. In the 1800s, you went from being a daughter to a wife, and the only way out of that was prostitution or going to a convent. But it was always about being controlled. For Lucia, it was not out of society’s norms for her brother to tell her who to marry. Or in the case of Luisa, that her father would be worried because the man she’s in love with is actually from the aristocracy. You didn’t do that. A peasant didn’t marry into the aristocracy.”

The stories that unfold musically in operas sometimes seem overly dramatic to modern audiences. But the heightened emotions make for good theater, DeRenzi says. 

“One also has to understand that there was a moral obligation of theater in the 1800s, especially in Italian opera, that it upheld the morality of a society. Cities had censors who censored operas and changed words. Depending on the city, it could be a political censorship: ‘We don’t want the king to be killed on our stage.’ It could be religious: ‘We don’t want you to say, ‘Oh God,’ you have to say, ‘Oh heaven.’ But it could also be a moral issue. Does the story say something about the morality of community, of how audiences react? That was a very big part of the opera house. It was and still should be. I think it’s not just entertainment. It’s art. We make people think and feel and hopefully react to these stories as members of our community.”

When planning a season, in addition to considerations such as variety and production costs, casting the right performers is critical. Two of the sopranos in the title roles have appeared in previous Sarasota Opera productions, while one is new to the company. 

“Our Carmen, Chelsea Laggan, was with us last year,” DeRenzi explains. “She was understudying the role of Thérèse (the title role of Jules Massenet’s opera), and we have what we call a cover run of a show, which means the understudies perform the opera. She set us all back on our heels. So we thought this would be good, to get someone to play Carmen who we know is dramatically and vocally interesting, and who has been part of this company. Moving people through our company is a very important part of what we do, and she certainly convinced all of us that she should advance with the company.”

Russell says, “Ashley Milanese as Lucia is somebody new to us, and the role calls for a special kind of voice. So we auditioned her, and we liked her. Ashley has a promising career. She’s been working in Europe a bit, and she has the kind of experience that lends itself to this role.”

In Luisa Miller, Aviva Fortunata portrays Luisa, Rafael Dávila is Rodolfo, and Ricardo José Rivera plays Miller, Luisa’s father. All three principals were featured in Sarasota Opera’s production of Ernani last season.

 “Happily, the cast for Luisa Miller is very similar in requirements to the Ernani cast,” notes Russell. “That was an incredible production, the principals were available and we were able to bring them back this season. That’s not always possible, especially with singers with the very dramatic voices this opera needs.”

While audiences love popular, frequently produced operas like Carmen, DeRenzi and Russell say their patrons also like to stretch a bit and see less familiar works on the Sarasota Opera House stage, like Luisa Miller, which is not performed on the world’s opera stages as often as Verdi‘s other works. 

“People like the comfort of the familiar, so they go to see Carmen or to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” says Russell. “But an opera like Luisa Miller, which people don’t necessarily know, is a great opportunity to learn something new, to experience something they may not have heard before. Verdi wrote 33 operas, and we hear five of them on a regular basis, but there are a whole bunch of them that are really good and that deserve to be heard. I think Luisa Miller is one of the strongest of those lesser-heard pieces.”

Russell would know; the Sarasota Opera is the only company in the world to have performed all of Verdi’s works in a nearly three-decade project called The Verdi Cycle, begun in 1989 and completed in 2016. 

At the other end of the spectrum from an opera like Luisa Miller, there have been thousands of productions of Carmen since its premiere in Paris in 1875. Russell says it’s “a great choice for someone to see as their first opera. It’s an extremely accessible piece, and it was my first opera, so I have a particular fondness for it. I feel like it’s dramatic. It’s got great music, and it flows well.”  

Even audiences who haven’t seen Carmen — and everyone who has — will recognize much of its music, including some of opera’s “greatest hits,” like “The Toreador Song” and “Habanera.” People have even been known to sing along from their seats when the orchestra strikes up these memorable tunes. 

“Opera is an interactive art form to a certain degree,” says DeRenzi. “Not in the sense that somebody is going to come downstage with a microphone and ask you to sing. But it is interactive in the sense that we need each other. We’re kind of useless without each other. We who are performing need an audience, and the audience needs performers. Otherwise, what’s the point of doing it? We need each other.”

Russell agrees. “I was talking to someone about how watching a movie on TV at home is one experience. But when you’re in a theater and experiencing it with a bunch of people, I think that heightens the experience for you and you’re sharing it with others and you’re more apt to start laughing out loud. And I think that’s the case with opera, too. I can listen in my car to a recording and think, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ But when I’m in a theater experiencing it live, I never know exactly what’s going to happen. And I’m with other people who are also hopefully on the edge of their seat with excitement about it. I think that’s a very special difference, and one we can all enjoy together.”

For tickets, contact the Sarasota Opera Box Office, by phone at 941-328-1300, in person at 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, or online at SarasotaOpera.org.

Haydn in Plain Sight: Rediscovering an Opera

Deceit Outwitted (L’infedeltà delusa), the final production in the Winter Opera Festival, is a light comedy composed by Joseph Haydn. Popular and prolific, he wrote more than 100 symphonies, as well as sonatas, concertos, string quartets and other works. But Haydn’s operas are much less familiar and are not often staged, compared to works by Puccini, Verdi and other composers who are known for operas. 

A Sarasota Opera premiere, Deceit Outwitted stands in stark contrast with the first three offerings in the Winter Festival, which all involve love stories and female title characters who (spoiler alert!) all meet tragic ends. 

As Haydn’s story unfolds, the peasant Filippo hopes his daughter Sandrina will marry the rich farmer Nencio instead of the poor peasant she loves. Through a series of comic complications (including a parade of disguises), all is resolved, accompanied by the celebrated composer’s inventive score and the cast members’ brilliant singing. Deceit Outwitted features Hanna Brammer as Vespina, Yulan Piao as Sandrina, William Davenport as Nencio, and David Walton as Filippo. 

Why hasn’t the world heard more about Haydn’s operas? Sarasota Opera General Director Richard Russell Russell explains: “He wrote them for a court in Hungary, a castle where they had a little opera house and he had his own small company. But he didn’t think his operas would export as well as his instrumental music. So he never bothered promoting the operas, and they never got published. The scores sat in a small library until after World War II, when they were transferred to the National Library in Budapest. And then all of a sudden researchers discovered these operas.”

Russell and Principal Conductor Victor DeRenzi considered staging other Haydn operas, but Deceit Outwitted fit best in the current season.

“We knew we had the singers to be able to do it,” says Russell, “and it seemed like an opportunity to present an opera from a significant composer. There’s some really wonderful music in it, and it’s a chance for singers to try something new, and for our audience to hear something different.”