A FORMULA FOR LONGEVITY
September 2025 in Articles
SARASOTA OPERA’S RICHARD RUSSELL TALKS TO JOHN FLEMING
Opera with Opera News November 2025
Sarasota Opera’s general director Richard Russell makes a point of mingling with patrons before performances and during intermission at Sarasota Opera House, as does the company’s artistic director Victor DeRenzi when he is not conducting. ‘I love the interaction with our audience,’ says Russell, who has held the West Florida company’s top administrative post since 2012. ‘It’s one of the great things about this situation. We have a rather intimate theatre, and a lot of people come on a regular basis. Talking with our patrons, engaging with them, hearing their stories is something I really enjoy. There are so many people in Florida who come from someplace else, and they are looking for a community. The opera becomes their social life and community centre.’
Russell earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in vocal performance and choral conducting from the Indiana University School of Music (now the Jacobs School of Music). A tenor, he sang with Sarasota Opera for four seasons, and for a decade with companies in New York and elsewhere, performing roles such as Rodolfo in La Bohème and the title role in Andrea Chénier. In 1998, after experiencing vocal problems, he stopped singing to take a job with Citigroup in New York, where he had long worked as a temp. He advanced rapidly to become a vice president of the bank, but his passion for opera never waned and he visited Sarasota most years to take in the winter festival. In 2005, when Russell was contemplating a career change from banking into arts administration, he sought the advice of Susan Danis, who at the time was the executive director of the company, and she suggested that he come to work as her marketing director. He basically learned opera management on the job in Sarasota, which led to his appointment as general director of Opera New Jersey (now defunct), from which post he was hired to return to Sarasota to succeed Danis when she left to head Florida Grand Opera.
Under DeRenzi, who has been with the 67-year-old company since 1982, Sarasota Opera has cultivated a distinctive niche in the US opera ecosystem. ‘The mission of the company is staging works as the composer intended,’ says Russell, who considers DeRenzi to be his musical mentor. DeRenzi’s staunchly traditional approach reached full bloom in the Verdi Cycle, an epic project to stage all of the composer’s 28 operas, plus alternative versions, and everything else he wrote, from the Requiem to art songs and chamber music.
Russell was present at the beginning and end of this landmark achievement. At its start, in 1989, when he was a tenor in the Sarasota apprentice programme, he sang in the chorus of Rigoletto. And at the cycle’s conclusion, in 2016, in addition to his duties as chief executive, he was onstage again in what he describes as his ‘most memorable night in the theatre. It was the last performance in the cycle, and I sang in the chorus in a concert that featured the Te Deum from Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces. Members of the Verdi family and other representatives from Italy were there in the full house. That was a special night in a special time.’
While the Verdi Cycle was a wonderful experience for Russell and the company, the Covid pandemic a few years later was a nightmare. Sarasota responded to the crisis with creative programming for a socially distanced, masked audience—the 2021 winter festival consisted of four Baroque and Classical chamber operas including a pair of early Rossini works—but it has been challenging for the company to regain its footing in the pandemic’s aftermath. ‘I think we’re at an inflection point now because audiences have changed post-pandemic,’ Russell says. ‘It’s not the same audience we had in 2017, 2018 and 2019. We have seen huge percentages of new people in recent seasons, with up to 40 per cent being first timers. Understanding our audience is going to be important, and that might mean diversifying our repertoire somewhat.’
Programming the seasons is a balancing act: ‘One of the challenges is that we’re kind of a hybrid,’ Russell says. ‘We’re a festival that people travel to, like Santa Fe or Des Moines or Glimmerglass—last season about 30 per cent of our audience was from out of state—but 50 per cent of our audience is from Sarasota and adjacent Manatee counties. And while our local audience is pretty conservative in their musical and dramatic taste, and a portion of our visitor audience likes our traditional approach and comes specifically for it, there are also those who travel here because they want to see something different. To them the rare pieces we have done through the years—such as La Wally or Haydn’s L’infedeltà delusa and the obscure Verdi operas—have been the draw. It’s a challenge to balance all these audiences.’
From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the 2025 festival was one of Sarasota’s strongest ever, with excellent, well-cast productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia—a neat opportunity for devotees to trace the Beaumarchais Figaro plays on which both operas are based—along with Verdi’s Stiffelio and a double bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci. However, overall attendance of about 75 per cent capacity for the 33 performances in the 1,100-seat opera house was disappointing. Both the Rossini and Mozart were popular, but Stiffelio and Cav and Pag didn’t meet projections. It was the third consecutive season in which the Verdi offering underperformed at the box office, following productions of Ernani and Luisa Miller.
Last winter’s festival was compromised by the damage wrought by hurricanes Helene and Milton, which hit the Gulf Coast of Florida hard in the autumn of 2024. ‘We had been seeing attendance growth post-Covid, but it was flat last season,’ Russell says. ‘I think a lot of that had to do with the two hurricanes and how they impacted ticket sales. On the barrier islands, where a lot of our audience lives, many people still didn’t have access to their places. The hurricanes impacted visitation, with our tourist development tax revenue in Sarasota County down ten per cent. Vacation rentals were down.’
Hurricanes and Covid are not the only challenges Russell has had to cope with in recent years. Under the Republican Governor Ron DeSantis the political climate for arts and culture is not good in the Sunshine State. DeSantis eliminated all state funding for the arts in 2024—some was restored this year, including a grant for $150,000 to Sarasota Opera—and his anti-LGBTQ+ policies stained the state’s reputation. Russell has lost some staff members who left because they didn’t feel comfortable in a state that passed a ‘don’t-say-gay’ law for schools and removed travel tips for gay and lesbian tourists from its website, leading gay organizations
to advise against travelling to Florida. Under DeSantis the state’s campaign to dismantle ‘woke’ diversity initiatives in educational institutions and throughout government has been strident and deeply harmful. Sarasota has long been a cultural mecca in Florida, with a rich array of theatre, classical music, dance and visual arts organizations, but their identities feel increasingly fragile in a larger community zealously lined up behind the MAGA manifesto of Donald Trump.
‘The politics part of it is increasingly a bigger part of my job, and it’s not something I relish,’ says Russell. ‘A while ago the political conversation around DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] and other stuff was really impacting us, but I think it has settled down.’ So far, he has not seen reluctance by singers to audition and perform with the company. ‘I get that some of our artists may be frustrated or infuriated by news that they hear or see or read while they’re here. A wide range of people work with us, and I just hope that we as a company create an environment that makes everyone feel safe and welcome. Ultimately, all we can do is focus on the work and try to do our best, and hope that it speaks well for our organization and the art form.’
In the current season, the Sarasota Opera programming is somewhat more varied than in seasons past. ‘In the winter, we open with Bohème, which we’ve done many times, of course, but we are also doing The Merry Widow, which we haven’t done since 1988, and that’s something lighter for our audience,’ Russell says. Il trovatore, also on the agenda, was produced in two different seasons of the Verdi Cycle—as well as the French adaptation, Le Trouvère—but the last time the work was staged by the company was in 2014. Completing the festival will be Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, with the soprano Hanna Brammer in the title role, to honour the centennial of Floyd, who taught at Florida State University (where Susannah, featuring Phyllis Curtin, had its premiere in 1955). Sarasota has a long history with his works, having staged Susannah in 1971 and 1973 and Of Mice and Men in a 2013 production attended by the composer, who died in 2021.
Speaking of 100th anniversaries, the Sarasota Opera House will celebrate that milestone in 2026. The company has owned the building since 1979, providing it with a key asset lacked by many regional opera companies that rent their venues. In April the company will hold a concert and gala dinner to celebrate its historic space, where Elvis Presley performed in 1956. Nowadays the compact theatre is especially conducive to Mozart. The company continues a string of his operas with five performances of Così fan tutte in October and November. In addition, Sarasota Youth Opera will stage a pair of performances of Brundibár, by the Czech composer Hans Krása with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, in November. Written in 1938, the opera was originally performed by children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II, and its story of an evil organ grinder is a powerful anti-fascist allegory.
With an annual budget of $10.5 million, Sarasota is the largest of the 11 professional opera companies in Florida and it has been notably resourceful in business matters during Russell’s tenure. When he took up the post of general director 13 years ago, the endowment was valued at $4.75m, and it was up to $13m this past summer (with another $2m from a bequest expected to arrive by November). Housing for artists, at the peak of the winter tourism season, has been greatly facilitated by the $5.75m purchase and furnishing of a 30-unit condominium complex that is a short walk from the opera house and is rented to other Sarasota nonprofit groups when the company doesn’t need it. ‘The apartments have been a real boon to us, especially as rental rates in Sarasota have gone through the roof,’ says Russell, who was also instrumental in acquiring the inventory of the Canadian costume-rental business Malabar Ltd, which includes some 100,000 items available to opera companies and other theatrical and film organizations. Sarasota also rents out sets, with those for Carmen, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Rigoletto and Bohème being especially popular.
As the general and artistic directors, Russell and DeRenzi are co-equal leaders of the company, each reporting to the board of trustees. They both attend, along with the company’s artistic administrator and the head of the apprentice programme, the annual auditions held in New York, Chicago and Sarasota. Out of more than 400 applications, they hear about 200 singers and choose 24 for the apprentice programme to work as choristers and learn the ropes of an opera company. Through the years, plenty of successful opera singers got their start as Sarasota apprentices, including Dwayne Croft, Kathleen Kim, Russell Thomas, Michael Hendrick, Leah Crocetto and William Joyner. Russell also provides input in the casting of principal artists (though the artistic director has the final say) and the dozen or so young singers deemed Studio Artists, who perform named roles—and sometimes sing in the chorus—and cover principal roles.
Sarasota Opera productions: (l.) ‘Turandot’ in 2019, with Kara Shay Thomson in the title role, Jonathan Burton as Calaf and Richard Russell as Altoum; (r.) ‘Aida’ in 2016, with Michelle Johnson in the title role and Jonathan Burton as Radames, photos: Rod Millington
‘Happily, Victor and I generally agree on the voices we like, and the kinds of voices that will work in the repertoire we do,’ Russell says. ‘We tend to look for singers who sing with a great deal of commitment and musicality—singers who convey the emotion underlying the piece and pay attention to the text. Especially with Verdi, Victor is very text-oriented, and he does a table reading of the libretto on the first day of rehearsal, like a theatre company going over a script. He wants to make sure that singers are not just making beautiful sounds, but that the words carry meaning behind the sound.’
DeRenzi, 76, will celebrate his 45th year with the company in 2026-7, when a new production of La traviata is in the works. Given his mastery of the Italian repertoire and his remarkably long tenure as artistic director, the conductor will be a tough act to follow when he steps down or retires. Russell, with his background as a singer and strong track record as CEO, would seem to be a logical successor as a general director combining administrative and artistic responsibilities, as is the case with many opera companies. While declining to speculate about future leadership plans of the company, he acknowledges that he has thought about what it would look like after DeRenzi. ‘Verdi and Victor are so closely tied together that if he were to leave we’d probably be looking at a wider variety of works. We’d still do Verdi because it’s such an important part of the repertoire. I think we’d be more open to contemporary works than Victor is. But I don’t anticipate changing dramatically were he to retire, because I think the mission he initiated is right for this company, right for this theatre, and right for this community.’
Sarasota has never produced a premiere—save for half a dozen youth operas—which is how many companies seek to reinvent themselves and stay fresh amid the well-known works that continue to appeal to audiences. Russell believes there is a way to be innovative within the boundaries of his company’s traditional approach. ‘There are many ways to give artists the freedom to put their stamp on a production, rather than doing, say, Carmen the same as always. The important thing for me is being respectful of the text and music. When a director ignores the text or music, ignores what the composer was trying to express, that’s where you lose me as an audience member. I think that within the framework of what we do here you can be creative with the text and the music.’
‘Così fan tutte’ runs from October 31 to November 15, c. Victor DeRenzi, d. Stephanie Sundine, and ‘Brundibár’ is performed on November 8 and 9, c. Jessé Martins, d. Martha Collins. www.sarasotaopera.org
