Victor DeRenzi’s Celebrates 30 Years with the Sarasota Opera
By Steven J. Smith

Victor DeRenzi is a Sarasota cultural icon. Now in his 30th remarkable season as artistic director and principal conductor for the Sarasota Opera, DeRenzi has produced over 70 different operas and conducted more than 500 performances. He has devoted a great deal of his enviable career to building the opera company while continuing to conduct nationally and internationally as well — notably with Chicago’s Lyric Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and even the Toledo and New Orleans operas. In addition, he has conducted in Hong Kong, Nice, the Canary Islands, and in many Canadian cities.

Maestro DeRenzi is also a recognized specialist of the works of Giuseppe Verdi, and this March Sarasota audiences will see him conduct Verdi’s “Otello” (his favorite opera) as part of an ongoing quest he began in 1989 to conduct the entire canon of Verdi’s 33 works. That quest will be realized within the next few years, and Sarasota Opera will be the only company in the world ever to do it.

“I fell in love with opera when I was twelve,” he recalled one afternoon recently, in his downtown Sarasota office. “I saw an opera performed by a small opera company. Having lived in New York, I was fortunate to see a lot of performances as a teenager. And I decided early on that I wanted to be a conductor.”

DeRenzi studied his craft and began working as a musician in the 1960s. By 1969 he began conducting.

“There were a lot of small companies in New York City that did operas with varying levels of performance — small orchestra, bigger orchestra — so there were a lot of opportunities, and a lot of people willing to take a chance on someone like me,” he said.

Those opportunities led to him conducting a wide range of styles — operas, choral music, symphonies, concert band music, and chamber music — which broadened his horizons and sharpened his skills.

“But I always knew I wanted to conduct operas,” he said.

By 1982 DeRenzi learned the fledgling Sarasota Opera was looking for a new conductor and he believed it was a place he might exert some positive influence.

“In my first season here most of the operas we did were with just a piano,” he said. “My goal was to make this company as good as it could be. I didn’t come here just to get a job and then move on to another job. That’s why I’m still here.”

When asked what he knows about his craft now that he didn’t know 20 years ago, DeRenzi laughed and simply said, “Everything.”

“One thing that has not changed is my respect for the composer,” he said. “But along the way I’ve come to believe that there may be differences between what’s printed in the score and what the composer’s intentions are. When I first started my feeling was that when I had a score in front of me, that told me everything about what the composer wanted. I still have great respect for the score, but I now try to put the score in context with how the composer wrote it and the time in which he wrote it.”

Finding something new
Maestro DeRenzi has conducted certain operas more than once. For example, Sarasota Opera’s recent offering of “Madama Butterfly” was his third Sarasota production of that opera, and his tenth overall. Yet he maintained that he always finds something new and interesting in operas he’s conducted mulitple times.

“I always start from scratch,” he said. “I open up a score that has no marks in it, that is brand new, and I look at it in a fresh way. There are also certain things that are going to happen with different singers in the roles that might alter the opera’s interpretation somewhat.”

A noted conductor of the operas of Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, DeRenzi said those two composers wielded an enormous influence on him as a young man, adding that the world of opera quite literally stands on their shoulders.

“You can’t do operas without Verdi and Puccini,” he said. “Without those two composers I don’t think we’d have opera houses anymore, when you think of how many of their operas are standard repertoire.”

Which brought him back to Sarasota Opera’s commitment to producing the Verdi Cycle.

“In terms of our audience, we’ve been able to build a trust in Verdi,” he said. “People here have gotten to love Verdi, even the operas they never heard of. Historically speaking, audiences have downgraded some of his lesser-known operas and I think over the years our audience has come to see that those pieces work theatrically — that there’s a theatrical essence of a Verdi opera that you don’t get if you listen to a recording or if you play it at the piano. It’s dramatic, and musical truth is revealed through a performance. Verdi was an opera composer, a theatrical composer.”

DeRenzi added that he was looking forward to the company’s upcoming production of “Otello.”

“Verdi’s melody is so specific to every moment in the piece,” he said. “And so true to the drama and to the moment. Verdi loved Shakespeare. Did you know that Italian audiences’ first experience of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ was Verdi’s interpretation of it? With ‘Otello’ he absolutely hits Shakespeare on the mark, and with ‘Falstaff’ he actually improves upon Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor.’”

DeRenzi added he was fortunate that Sarasota Opera never pushes him to conduct operas he doesn’t like.

“I’m not a big fan of baroque opera, which is opera before Mozart’s time,” he said. “Because I don’t like it, I don’t do it.”

He added there are a lot of romantic Italian operas from the late 1800s and early 1900s that he would like to take a crack at, such as Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and “The Girl of The Golden West”, for example.

“Now that we have renovated the opera house, there’s a lot of repertory we can do that we couldn’t do before,” he said. “Wagner being part of that. I’d like to do some Wagnerian operas.”

Opera training programs
DeRenzi was instrumental in initiating the Sarasota Youth Opera Program, which introduces young people between the ages of 8 and 18 to all aspects of opera. The program constitutes a remarkable learning and performing opportunity with three Youth Opera choruses and an annual production of a professionally staged opera with the Youth Opera members performing.

“The program started in 1985 and hundreds of kids have been through the program,” he said. “The idea is to introduce them to opera through the singing, but also to let them understand that singing in opera is different from singing in your church chorus. It’s an art form that’s theatrical and incorporates acting.”

Maestro DeRenzi's interest in the training of professional singers also led to the founding of Sarasota Opera's Apprentice and Studio Artists programs. Chosen from national auditions, the participants in the Apprentice Artists Program form the chorus for the main stage opera productions and perform in outreach programs. Many former Sarasota Opera Apprentice and Studio Artists have gone on to perform leading roles with the company as well as with the major opera houses of the world.

“One such artist is Kathleen Kim, who will return to play the title role in ‘Lucia Di Lammermoor’ with us this season,” DeRenzi said.

Dedicated opera-goers and loyal supporters Harry and Victoria Leopold have been prominent members of the Sarasota Opera family for a decade and friends with DeRenzi almost that long. They have been particularly supportive of the Youth Opera programs and are passionate about encouraging the growth of young artists.

“Victor’s a pure genius,” Harry said. “I don’t know that there is any other conductor in the world that knows every word of every opera that he performs.”

“The Sarasota cultural scene wouldn’t exist without him,” Victoria added. “He has elevated and helped define what Sarasota is culturally.”

Susan Danis, executive director of Sarasota Opera, couldn’t agree more.

“What Sarasota Opera is artistically, is Victor,” Danis said. “Ideas and passions he’s had — whether it be our commitment to do all the works of Giuseppe Verdi, the masterworks revival series, or the American classics — are often things that he feels passionately about. And they’ve actually not only ended up becoming cornerstones of the company, they’ve helped to create a market niche for us as well.”