Letter from Florida: Sarasota Opera's Winter Festival

Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro - Sarasota Opera, 2025 - (Photo: Robert Millington for Sarasota Opera)

Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, Verdi: Stiffelio, Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia, Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana, Leoncavallo: Pagliacci: Sarasota Opera; Sarasota Opera House, Sarasota, Florida
Reviewed by Robert J Carreras, 25-29 March 2025

In our latest Letter from Florida, Robert J Carreras enjoys Sarasota Opera's 2025 Winter Festival and considers what next for this enterprising company and its quirkily diminutive performance space

What’s next for Sarasota Opera? In recent years, this company seems to have covered all the proverbial operatic bases, advancing from a specialized regional outfit to something like a full-throated and fully invested international opera theatre. Sarasota Opera defies the typical classification of regional company as it has come to be known in the United States, existing more like a top-tier company homed in a quirkily diminutive performance space.

Of late, Sarasota's performers are more well-rounded, with exciting voices the rule. The stage direction is more concentrated, more diffusely assumed across even supers, and more topically informed. The music-making has kept pace, with visiting conductors adding spicy stylistic touches to already stellar orchestra playing. What’s next?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the answer to that question for many opera companies. Three of Mozart’s operas take up spots in the top ten most performed operas in the world since the millennium according to OPERABASE. Le nozze di Figaro, sixth on that count, is in repertory for Sarasota’s 2025 Winter Festival.