Giuseppe Verdi, portrait by Giovanni Boldini.
THE MUSIC OF
Giuseppe Verdi
PROGRAM
La forza del destino
Aida
Aida
Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera
Attila
La traviata
Don Carlo
I Lombardi alla prima crociata
La forza del destino
Rigoletto
Sarasota Orchestra
Victor Starsky, Radamès
Rochelle Bard, Aida
Rochelle Bard, Amelia
Jean Carlos Rodríguez, Renato
Victor Starsky, Riccardo
Jean Carlos Rodríguez, Ezio
Young Bok Kim, Attila
Virginia Mims, Violetta
Victor Starsky, Alfredo
INTERMISSION
Young Bok Kim, Filippo II
Rochelle Bard, Giselda
Victor Starsky, Oronte
Young Bok Kim, Pagano
Rochelle Bard, Leonora
Virginia Mims, Gilda
Jean Carlos Rodríguez, Rigoletto
Sarasota Orchestra
Victor DeRenzi, conductor
Virginia Mims, soprano
Rochelle Bard, soprano
Victor Starsky, tenor
Jean Carlos Rodríguez, baritone
Young Bok Kim, bass
Sinfonia
“Celeste Aida”
“Ritorna vincitor”
“Morrò ma prima in grazia" Eri tu”
“Ma se m’è forza perderti”
“Tardo per gli anni, e tremulo”
“Ah, forse lui”- “Sempre libera”
“Ella giammai m’amò”
“Qual voluttà trascorrere” “Pace, pace mio Dio”
"Tutte le feste al tempio" Sì, vendetta, tremenda vendetta"
Tis performance is dedicated to the memory of Ernie Kretzmer, a great friend of Sarasota Opera and generous supporter of Sarasota's arts organizations.
Verdi IN SARASOTA
Tby Marina Harss
The relationship between Sarasota Opera and Giuseppe Verdi has been a long and fruitful one. And like all mature relationships it has evolved and deepened over time. Its most obvious expression was, of course, the Verdi Cycle, a decades-long project that culminated in 2016 with performances of Verdi’s Aida and La battaglia di Legnano, as well as a conference led by a panel of Verdi experts, and a grand, fnal Verdi concert. The stretch of Pineapple Ave. in front of the Opera House was even renamed Verdi Place for a time. This towering fgure in opera was fêted with the verve and respect he deserves.
By that time, Sarasota Opera had performed all of the music Verdi composed over the course of his lifetime—at least all that is available—an achievement unmatched by any other company in the world. That included all of the operas, plus their variants, plus his chamber music, early works, ecclesiastical pieces, and ballet music, and even a few pages that had been excised from longer scores before the offcial premiere.
Why do such a thing? Verdi’s central place in the operatic repertoire is unquestioned, of course, assured by the lasting appeal of works like Rigoletto, La traviata, Il trovatore, Don Carlos, and Falstaff. (One could go on.) However, there are many more, like Un giorno di regno, I due Foscari, and Giovanna d’Arco, that are seldom, if ever, heard. But there is much to be enjoyed from experiencing the full arc of a composer’s work, especially one as rich as Verdi’s. You can see the way certain operas evolved over time, and how they infuenced later operas; you can hear how Verdi’s musical language developed, and how he adapted it to each subject he took on. “Verdi didn’t write the same way for an Egyptian leader (in Aida) as he did for a Parisian courtesan (La traviata) or King Philip II of Spain (Don Carlos),” says Maestro Victor DeRenzi, Artistic Director
of Sarasota Opera since 1982, who has conducted every Verdi opera performed here.
The Sarasota audience has had the beneft of seeing Verdi’s less familiar works performed onstage, with passion and commitment and in a style Verdi might have recognized, rather than in a recording. Verdi was not only a musician, but also a man of the theater. His music comes alive in the singers’ and orchestra players’ interpretations, in the sets, the costumes, the lighting. All this mattered to him. A recording can’t fully bring to life the world he created in his operas. “Listening to a recording is like looking at a very nice picture of Michelangelo’s David,” says DeRenzi. “You can’t see its greatness. These things are meant to be experienced in person; otherwise they remain abstractions.”
This commitment to Verdi did not end with the Cycle, of course. The 2016-17 season was the only one since 1989 in which not a single Verdi opera was performed. (Perhaps Verdi, too, needed a rest.) But he soon returned, in 2017 with La traviata, and Nabucco in 2018, and Rigoletto in 2019, and onward until this season, when the company is performing an all-Verdi concert—a regular occurrence over the years—and this coming winter, when it will perform the dramatic Stiffelio
A quick perusal of the company’s history with Verdi also gives a sense of its own growth and evolution over time. It was not until 1989, when the company created its frst group of Studio Artists, an ensemble of singers who could fll out the secondary roles and choruses, that the Opera was ready to perform the core Verdi repertory. That year, the company presented Rigoletto, with current General Director Richard Russell singing in the
chorus. The following year, Aroldo, a seldom-heard reworking of Stiffelio from 1857, was brought to the stage. “It felt like a world premiere, because no one in the audience had heard it before,” says DeRenzi. With the success of Aroldo, the idea of staging a series of Verdi rarities one could not see anywhere else in the world was born.
Three years later, in 1992, the company began its exploration of the many revisions of Verdi’s operas, of different lengths, in different languages, with or without ballet music. The first of these was Simon Boccanegra (1857), which the company performed in both the original (Venice) and revised (Milan) versions. Many of these revised and alternate versions had never been heard in the US; sometimes the work in question had not been staged at any opera house since the nineteenth century.
This was the case with Sarasota’s 1994 staging of the French version of The Sicilian Vespers, Les Vêpres siciliennes. Its North American premiere became the occasion of a two-day conference. Verdi experts from around the world convened in Sarasota to discuss various aspects of the composer’s French premieres. Other conferences and talks over the years explored such issues as Verdi’s compositional process and orchestrations, the importance of critical editions, and Verdi’s role in the unification of Italy. In a true sense, Sarasota has become a kind of Verdi laboratory.
Another important development in the company’s relationship to the composer’s music was the large-scale, 20 million dollar renovation of the Opera House that took place in 2008. That renovation resulted in the creation of a significantly expanded orchestra pit, which in turn made it possible for the company to bring to the stage some of Verdi’s largest works, which had before been out of reach, including Don Carlos (2009, 2016), Otello (2012), and Aida (2016).
One thing that did not change with that renovation was the scale of the Opera House auditorium, which seats about 1,100 audience members. Paradoxically perhaps, this is a good thing. The theaters in which Verdi’s operas were performed during his lifetime, in Venice, Milan, Parma, Florence and beyond were not behemoths like the Met or Chicago’s Civic Opera House, but smaller theaters with a capacity not much larger than Sarasota’s. Audiences could see the singers up close and feel the emotions being depicted; their potency projected all the way to the back row of the house. “I think it is so important that we didn’t lose that intimacy,” says De Renzi. “You can still feel that immediacy, that unfiltered emotion, just as you might have in Verdi’s time.”
It is just one of the many reasons Verdi has found a home here in Sarasota. And here is another. Since 1991, on January 26th, Verdi’s birthday, the entire staff of the theater has gathered to sing the moving chorus from Nabucco , “Va pensiero” in his memory. In Sarasota, Verdi has found a lasting home.
Marina Harss is a free-lance culture writer based in New York City and Sarasota. Her first book, The Boy From Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, was recently released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Darren Nimnicht as Rigoletto in Sarasota Opera's 1989 production.
Photo by Alan Ferguson.
Michelle Johnson as Aida and Jonathan Burton as Radamès in Sarasota Opera's 2016 production of Aida. Photo by Rod Millington.