Sarasota Opera Receives $50,000 Arts Appreciation Grant From The Gulf Coast Community Foundation

Sarasota Opera has been awarded a $50,000 Arts Appreciation Grant from the Gulf Coast Community Foundation. The grant offers unrestricted funding to area arts organizations in support of their artistic mission. This year's Arts Appreciation Grant will help support Sarasota Opera's 2018/2019 Season, which marks the company's 60th year of presenting world-class opera on the Southwest Florida Gulf Coast.

"We are most appreciative of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation for their long-standing support of Sarasota Opera," says Executive Director Richard Russell. "This grant will be used for production costs for our internationally recognized Opera Festival."

Sarasota Opera is committed to producing opera as a living art form: offering a stage for American-trained artists, producing high-caliber training programs, owning, maintaining, and operating the Opera House as a year-round facility, and promoting and increasing public knowledge and appreciation of opera. In addition to striving for artistic excellence, Sarasota Opera directs itself toward becoming accessible to all of the greater community. Coordinated artistic, educational, informational, and social outreach programs help accomplish this.

Sarasota Opera's Fall 2018 season saw the return of one of the most popular and beloved operas, Rossini's The Barber of Seville. In early November, Sarasota Youth Opera presented the acclaimed production of Benjamin Britten's The Little Sweep, which was preceded by a prologue created especially for Sarasota Youth Opera by conductor and Youth Opera Music Director Jesse Martins and stage director Martha Collins.

Sarasota Opera's 2019 Diamond Anniversary Season will celebrate 60 years of producing outstanding opera true to the vision of the composer, as well as entertaining, enriching, and educating our community and visitors from across the state and around the world. The festival will open with Giacomo Puccini's Turandot on February 9, and will be followed by Mozart's The Magic Flute, Verdi's Nabucco, and a Comic Double Bill: Donizetti's Rita and Wolf-Ferrari's Susanna's Secret-part of the "Beyond Verdi" series.

"We appreciate the Gulf Coast Community Foundation's support which recognizes the impact that our opera has on all those in our community," concludes Maestro Victor DeRenzi.

ABOUT GULF COAST COMMUNITY FOUNDATION

Together with its donors, Gulf Coast Community Foundation transforms our region through bold and proactive philanthropy. Gulf Coast is a public charity that was created in 1995 through the sale of the Venice Hospital. Since then, we have become the philanthropic home of more than 700 families who have established charitable funds here, and we have invested $300 million in grants in the areas of health and human services, civic and economic development, education, arts and culture, and the environment. Learn more at GulfCoastCF.org.

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