A searing contemporary opera about Auschwitz and the completion of an unprecedented 28-year effort to present all of the operas of Giuseppe Verdi are among the high points of the coming operatic season in southern Florida.
While the Sarasota Opera’s end of its Verdi Cycle will draw international attention, operaphiles closer to home will be eager to see Palm Beach Opera’s first mounting of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in March, as well as the return of its One Opera in One Hour productions at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace.
Palm Beach Opera: The West Palm Beach-based company, in the black and with a new music director and fresh talent on its board of directors, opens its 54th season in December with the third installment of its free waterfront concerts on Flagler Drive. Last year’s event featured the singers of the troupe’s Young Artists Program and baritone Michael Chioldi, who will return for this concert. It’s set for 2 p.m. Dec. 12 at the Meyer Amphitheatre. It’s a free event, but its gets crowded quickly, so set out early with your chairs and coolers.
The season opens in January with a box-office certainty, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, which is returning to the house after an absence of six years. Probably the finest 19th-century French opera, and certainly the most popular, it’s a dream role for a mezzo-soprano as the tempestuous Spanish cigarette factory worker who ensnares a naïve soldier in her wiles, and to his regret, discovers that when she speaks of being free, she means it. In the title role is the Israeli soprano Rinat Shaham, who starred as Carmen a few years back for Florida Grand Opera; the secondary cast is led by rising Canadian mezzo Nora Sourouzian. Leonardo Capalbo will sing Don José on Friday and Sunday; Dominick Chenes gets the call Saturday night. Eleni Calenos sings Micaëla, Zachary Nelson is Escamillo, and the South African bass Musa Ngqungwana is Zuniga. David Stern conducts, and John de los Santos stages the production. (Jan. 22-24, Kravis Center)
Gaetano Donizetti’s 1843 comedy Don Pasquale is up next in February, the delightful tale of a foolish old man who opposes his nephew’s marriage plans and gets his comeuppance when he gets married himself to his nephew’s intended, who has disguised herself and turns into a domestic terror. The Italian bass Carlo Lepore is Pasquale, with the American soprano Janai Brugger as Norina, and David Portillo as Ernesto. Baritone Lucas Meachem sings Dr. Malatesta. Guest conductor Antonino Fogliani and stage director Fenlon Lamb, who conducted and helmed last year’s production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, come back to Palm Beach for Don Pasquale. (Feb. 19-21, Kravis Center)
Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, which closes the mainstage productions in March, has become a steady repertory piece in the past couple decades, revered for its sumptuous music written by a master composer at the height of his powers. Premiered in 1912 as part of a double bill with a Molière play, it was revised in 1916 as a standalone opera in which a prologue presents us with an 18th-century Viennese townhouse where a new opera on the Ariadne legend is about to be performed. Wendy Bryn Harmer, last seen in the house in 2009 as Adalgisa in Bellini’s Norma, takes the role of Ariadne, alternating on Saturday night with Amber Wagner. Brian Jagde and Jeffrey Hartman share the role of Bacchus, while soprano Kathleen Kim takes on Zerbinetta (and her gigantic aria, “Grossmächtige Prinzessin”), while house favorite Irene Roberts, a lustrous mezzo who sang The Muse in the company’s 2014 production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, is The Composer. The excellent German conductor Andreas Delfs leads the orchestra; the stage direction is by Daniel Witzke. (March 18-20)
The company also is returning to its One Opera in One Hour series, which present other repertory in free workshop performances by the Young Artists Program at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace. The shows are accompanied by piano only, and past operas have included everything from Handel’s Semele to Daniel Catan’s Florencia en el Amazonas. This year, the company will perform a true rarity, Enrique Granados’s Goyescas, which premiered in 1916 at the Metropolitan, only two months before the composer’s death at sea, when the ship he was traveling on was torpedoed in the English Channel by a German submarine. The opera, which deals with romantic rivalries that ends in a duel, features some of the music Granados had written for his well-known piano suite of the same name. (Jan. 29, CityPlace)
The company also welcomes mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe for a recital at the Four Arts featuring songs associated with mid-20th century popular singer Kate Smith (Jan. 13), and on Feb. 4, it hosts a gala a Mar-a-Lago with the great German soprano Diana Damrau, who will give a recital at the event. And the company’s Young Artists can be seen in a cabaret night Feb. 24 at CityPlace’s Palm Beach Improv and in a liederabend March 29 at the Royal Poinciana Chapel. (For more information, call 561-833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org; individual ticket sales start Sept. 26).
Florida Grand Opera: Three standard works from the Italian 19th-century core repertory share the billing with a powerful opera from 1960s Soviet Russia in FGO’s 75th anniversary season.
The season begins in November with Gioachino Rossini’s most popular opera, The Barber of Seville, which the company has mounted nine other times since 1947, most recently in 2010. This production borrowed from Vancouver Opera features David Pershall and Brian James Myer sharing duties as Figaro, Megan Marino and Hilary Ginther as Rosina, Andrew Owens as Count Almaviva and Kevin Short and Kevin Glavin as Dr. Bartolo. Alex Soare is Don Basilio, and Eliza Bonet sings Berta. Artistic director Ramón Tebar conducts, with stage direction by Marc Astafan. (Five performances from Nov. 14-21, Ziff Ballet Opera House Miami; two performances Dec. 3 and 5 at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Fort Lauderdale)
Vincenzo Bellini’s greatest hit, Norma, is next up, and it’s only the second time the company has presented this lush bel canto work (the only other production dates to 1990). Mlada Khudoley is Norma, sharing with Mary Elizabeth Williams; Dana Beth Miller and Catherine Martin trade off the role of Adalgisa, Giancarlo Monsalve and Frank Porretta take Pollione, and Burak Bilgili is Oroveso. Anthony Barrese conducts; the Cincinnati Opera production will be directed by Nic Muni. (Five performances from Jan. 23-30 at the Ziff Ballet Opera House; two performances Feb. 11 and 13, Broward Center)
In one of the more remarkable recent operatic stories, an opera by the Soviet composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, written in 1968 for the Bolshoi Opera but shelved there, and not presented until 2010 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria, has taken American companies by storm. The Passenger tells the story of a German couple heading to South America after World War II when the wife sees on board the ship a passenger who may have been at Auschwitz, where she served as a guard. It’s a harrowing tale, accompanied by a gritty score reminiscent of Weinberg’s friend and fellow composer Dmitri Shostakovich. FGO is using the Bregenz production, with its two-tier set showing the ship above and Auschwitz below. An all-debut cast includes Adrienn Miksch as Marta, Daveda Karansas as Lisa, David Danholt as Walter, Anna Gorbachyova as Katja, Kathryn Day as Bronka, John Moore as Tadeusz and Géraldine Dulex as the Overseer. The fine American conductor Steven Mercurio leads from the pit, with stage direction by David Pountney. (Five performances from April 2 to 9, Ziff Ballet Opera House)
The company closes its mainstage season in May with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (last seen at FGO in 2002), in a clever production for Scottish Opera by FGO stalwarts Renaud Doucet and André Barbe that resets the comedy in the early 1960s. Kristopher Irtimer takes the role of the foolish Pasquale, and Laura Tatulescu sings Norina, with Elena Galván stepping in for two performances. Jesús Álvarez and Daniel Bates handle Ernesto, and Marco Nisticò is Dr. Malatesta. Tebar leads the music, and Doucet does the stage direction. (Five performances from May 7 to 14, Ziff Ballet Opera House)
For more information, call 800-741-1010 or visit www.fgo.org.
Sarasota Opera: In its 57th season, the southwest Florida company achieves a milestone, the end of a nearly three-decade effort by company artistic director Victor DeRenzi to present every single note Giuseppe Verdi ever composed for the stage. It’s a remarkable achievement, and in addition to two Verdi operas, the house will present a week of programs in mid-March devoted to the composer, including two concerts and the hosting of an international conference.
The company opens in the fall with Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, the most beloved of all operas, with the young American Jessica Rose Cambio as the doomed Mimi, and the Uruguayan tenor Martín Nusspaumer as Rodolfo. Angela Mortellaro is Musetta opposite Craig Irvin’s Marcello, with Gideon Dabi as Schaunard and Colin Ramsey as Colline, in a production conducted by DeRenzi and staged by Stephanie Sundine. (Seven performances from Oct. 30 to Nov. 17).
The company’s youth troupe also presents two performance of Czech composer Hans Krása’s children’s opera, Brundibar. The story of forest animals that help two children save their ill mother while thwarting the plans of Brundibar, the evil organ grinder, it has gone down in history for its sad context: It was the opera presented by the inmates of the Terezin concentration camp as part of a successful Nazi propaganda effort to hoodwink the Red Cross about life at the camps; Krása was exterminated along with most of the cast at Auschwitz in 1944. (Two performances on Nov. 14)
Unlike Florida Grand Opera and Palm Beach Opera, Sarasota Opera has its four spring productions in repertory, so that an audience member can see all four in a week if he or she so chooses (this season, it’s the first week in March).
First up is Verdi’s Aïda, his epic Egyptian-themed grand opera, presented in what will be the largest-ever production mounted by Sarasota Opera. It will be presented 12 times, with Michelle Johnson in the title role, and Jonathan Burton as Radamès. Leann Sandel-Pantaleo sings Amneris, Marco Nisticò is Amonasro, Young Bok Kim is Ramfis, and Jeffrey Beruan sings the role of the pharaoh. DeRenzi conducts, and Sundine stage-directs. (12 performances from Jan. 30-March 19)
Mozart’s great Da Ponte comedy of pre-Ashley Madison infidelity, Così fan Tutte, debuts second, with Jennifer Townshend and Shirin Eskandani as Fiordiligi and Dorabella, opposite Heath Huberg and Corey Crider as Ferrando and Guglielmo. Stefano de Peppo sings Don Alfonso, who gets the whole thing moving, and Angela Mortellaro is the wily Despina. Marcello Cormio conducts a stage production by Kathleen Smith Belcher. (Nine performances from Feb. 6-March 12)
Ludwig van Beethoven tried several times to compose an opera, but ended up succeeding only once, with Fidelio, a tale of marital love and political oppression that pressed a lot of the composer’s hot buttons and brought from him a beautiful and profound score. Kara Shay Thomson sings Leonore, with Michael Robert Hendrick as Florestan. Harold Wilson is Rocco, Sean Anderson is Don Pizzaro, Jeffrey Beruan is Don Fernando, and Vanessa Isiguen is Marzelline. Ekhart Wycik leads the music; Tom Diamond stage-directs. (Seven performances from Feb. 13-March 11)
The season and the Verdi Cycle close with the master’s La Battaglia di Legnano, a rarely seen 1849 opera about two soldiers in love with the same woman in the wild and woolly days of the 12th century and the attempt by Italians to repel the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Jennifer Black sings Lida, the object of the warriors’ affection, with Martín Nusspaumer and Todd Thomas as Arrigo and Rolando, rivals for her love. Young Bok Kim sings Barbarossa, Harold Wilson is Marcovaldo, and Tara Curtis is Imelda. DeRenzi conducts a stage production by Martha Collins. (Seven performances from Feb. 27-March 18)
Other events include a concert Nov. 7 of music by Jewish composers who were banned by the Nazis, and on March 17, a concert of music by the young Verdi, before his first opera, Oberto, in 1839. The grand finale of the season occurs March 20 with a performance of the Te Deum, one of Verdi’s final works, along with a selection of favorite songs and ensembles from his operas.
The Sarasota Opera House is located at 61 N. Pineapple Ave. in Sarasota. For more information, call 941-328-1300 or visit sarasotaopera.org.