A sharp opera for flat times

SARASOTA, Fla. -- At a time when U.S. opera companies are undertaking fewer performances, trimming expenses and cutting back repertory in tough times, the Sarasota Opera is among the few companies that refuse to push the panic button. It is not only surviving but also prospering -- this, in a state that is considering eliminating public arts funding altogether.

One obvious reason is that there’s money to support culture in this well-manicured corridor of southern Florida. Sarasota County -- with a population of just fewer than 326,000 -- is home to two professional orchestras, more than 10 theaters, 30 art galleries and a ballet company. None raises bigger budgets or draws on a larger local, national and international public than the $4.8-million Sarasota Opera. Ticket sales this year declined only 2% to 3%, for a loss of about $46,000, from last year’s record revenues of $2.04 million -- not bad for any opera producer in a flat economy.

The less obvious reason is that Sarasota Opera is giving its audiences -- business-suited seniors as well as the jeans-and-Gucci-loafers younger crowd the company actively woos -- the kind of opera they can’t hear or see anywhere else.

In two-month festivals that run from early February through late March, the company presents four or five operas, using mainly American singers and an orchestra of up to 50 players. The repertory mixes standard works with neglected or seldom-heard fare. The season just past included Montemezzi’s “L’Amore dei Tre Re” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” (in both the 1847 original version and the standard 1865 revision).

When a company depends on box-office revenues for as much as 50% of its income, giving the public what it wants is crucial. Sarasota Opera pitches its musical wares to essentially two types of patrons: those who know opera inside and out, and those who’ve never attended an opera.

“If I can move both kinds of listeners, then I feel I have achieved something,” says Victor DeRenzi, the company’s artistic director and principal conductor since 1982.

The 53-year-old New York native has trained his public to appreciate the standard operatic canon he grew up with -- particularly Verdi and Mozart. DeRenzi says he will not present works he personally doesn’t believe in -- including Baroque opera, Benjamin Britten and most 20th century works.

That seems to be fine with his audience, which this year filled 95% to 96% of the seats. That’s high by the standards of most U.S. opera companies.

In 1989, the Sarasota Opera launched what promises to be the opera world’s first really complete Verdi cycle. When the cycle is completed in 2013, just in time for the composer’s birth bicentennial, the company will have performed every note written by Verdi.

Another thing that sets Sarasota apart from many smaller opera companies is DeRenzi’s insistence on what he calls “traditional, romantic” productions, sung in the original languages (Sarasota was an early advocate of supertitles).

“I like to think of us as an avant-garde company, since Sarasota Opera is about the only place where directors observe the stage directions that are in the score and the traditions of the period in which the works were written,” DeRenzi explains.

In so doing, he hopes to attract neophytes to opera as well as seasoned opera-goers.

The other important part of his artistic mission is the training of young singers. “I hear perhaps 300 singers each year, on every level, professional and amateur, and I have to say the quality of training I see is really terrible. They have no language or acting skills, no awareness of style. I feel our apprentice program gives them that,” DeRenzi says.

Sarasota’s apprentice and studio programs supply chorus members and understudies for the main-stage season. Their greater value, however, is to ensure there will be a steady stream of well-trained American voices to fill slots in opera company rosters across the nation.

John von Rhein is music critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.