Sarasota Opera digs into a love torn apart in Verdi’s ‘Luisa Miller’

Sarasota Opera Artistic Director Victor DeRenzi is certainly one of the world’s experts on the works of composer Giuseppe Verdi. He is, after all, the only person to have conducted every work that Verdi wrote as part of the Sarasota Opera’s 28-year Verdi Cycle

Still, he blames Verdi himself for a lack of attention and popularity for “Luisa Miller,” the 14th of his 37 operas, first produced in 1849.

The company’s third production of the season is “the one that’s not appreciated as much as it should be,” DeRenzi said. “That’s Verdi’s fault. He wrote so many great operas, and people are going to do ‘La Traviata,’ ‘Tosca,’ ‘Aida’ and others first.”

Sarasota Opera last produced “Luisa MIller” in 1999, 10 years into the Verdi Cycle, but DeRenzi is studying it as if it’s new to him, as he does with any project.

“I try not to bring the habits of the old to the new. Even if I conduct an opera like ‘La Traviata,’ I try to sift through performance practice, how Verdi might have done this opera, as opposed to how I grew up hearing it,¨ he said. When he first heard the works, “operas from this time were really interpreted from the perspective of the early 20th century and my goal is to get closer to how Verdi found expression in the music.”

DeRenzi is working with his wife, Stephanie Sundine, a former singer who is now an opera stage director, and three leading singers who shared the stage together in last season’s Verdi opera “Ernani.”

Soprano Aviva Fortunata returns as Luisa, a young woman who is the daughter of an old soldier. Luisa is in love with Rodolfo, the son of the ruthless Count Walter, who forbids the couple from being together. Tenor Rafael Dávila, who marked 20 years with Sarasota Opera last season in the title role of “Ernani,” plays Rodolfo, and baritone Ricardo José Rivera, who appeared as Don Carlo in “Ernani,” plays Miller, Luisa’s father. They are joined by bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi as Count Walter.

Fortunata said she finds the piece special because “it is really an opera about ordinary people at heart. Luisa and her father are just normal people who live in a village that get sucked into something larger than them. She is the sweetest and most loving of people and it’s a pleasure to explore that and what happens to her when she deals with this larger-than-life intrigue.”

The challenge of a leading Verdi role is that “you need to be five different singers at the same time. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes colatura, high, or low. He demands of you that you’re all these things at once, while also serving the drama.”

As director, Sundine said her biggest challenge rests “with the fact that there isn’t a lot of activity. In ‘Carmen’ there’s more action, dancing. That’s not true with ‘Luisa.’ But the drama is so strong and our cast is so strong and gifted vocally and dramatically that we’re able to convey a tremendous amount of emotion in a production that isn’t relying on lots of activity and movement.”

Unlike some singers who may study past performances and productions of certain roles, Fortunata said she tries “not to be influenced by outside aspects. After I perform something, I get interested to see how other people do it and if I were to watch one, I would watch a crazy out-there production. I just try to keep going back to the score, seeing what’s written there and what I can mine.”

DeRenzi said there is a tendency for some singers to “learn so much through listening to a specific recording that they lose that sense of discovery.”

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At Sarasota Opera, singers like Fortunata are given the time to fully immerse themselves in their roles, with weeks of rehearsals and a large number of performances (there are six for “Luisa Miller”).

“We have the luxury of a great rehearsal period here to get into these details, talk about something technically or blocking-wise, so by the time you step on stage in front of an audience, you are thinking as the character,” Fortunata said. “If I’m listening to someone, I’m just listening as Luisa and just having a natural reaction.

Being reunited with Dávila and Rivera eases the process.

“We know how we perform,” she said. “We know who we are as people, there’s so much trust. I know how Rafi is going to sing. I think it makes us all better. You don’t have to fake anything.”

‘Luisa Miller’

By Giuseppe Verdi. Conducted by Victor DeRenzi, directed by Stephanie Sundine. March 9-24, Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota. $32-$165. 941-328-1300; sarasotaopera.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Verdi’s ‘Luisa Miller’ returns to Sarasota Opera after 25 years