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Close-up: St. Petersburg Opera’s Mark Sforzini (audio)
For years, St. Petersburg Opera Company’s annual holiday show was a huge production, combining a 40-piece orchestra with a massive choral ensemble (several of them, in fact) with soloists from opera, musical theater and more. It was a big to-do at the Palladium.
The 2019 edition, reports founder and artistic director Mark Sforzini, is a more intimate affair, with a cast of nine vocalists – all of whom have performed in other SPO productions – harmonizing, soloing and otherwise having a fun old time with Christmastime tunes … and more.
Holiday Sparkle (beginning an eight-performance run Thursday) will be presented at Opera Central, the group’s headquarters at 2145 1st Avenue S. Preis Hall, the approximately 150-seat performance space, has been turned into a black-box cabaret, with table seating.
Sforzini will conduct an orchestra of 15. “It’s got a jazz flavor to it,” he explains. “We have saxophones in addition to strings. And a rhythm section.”
The show was conceived by Sforzini and choreographer Robert Rigsby as an intimate alternative to the giant productions of previous holiday seasons.
“I think this is going to be pretty spectacular, and unlike most holiday shows,” Sforzini says. “We’re going to an ugly sweater party, where we’re focusing on some holiday songs from television in the ‘60s and ‘70s. We’re going to a holiday cocktail party. We’re doing a set called ‘Holiday Around the World.’ We’re doing a holiday choral set, which is a little more traditional, and then a holiday formal set. So we’re going to five different settings.”
Holiday Sparkle comes midway through St. Pete Opera’s 14th season. When Sforzini began the nonprofit organiztion, he was 15 years into his tenure as first bassoon with The Florida Orchestra.
In our audio interview, he picks up the story:
“I had started doing more and more conducting, and in doing that I was offered the opportunity to conduct a performance of Madama Butterfly at the Palladium Theater. It was the first time they had mounted an opera with an orchestra; they had been doing some operatic productions with piano.
“So that was the start of it. I had a deep intuition that it was meant to be my life’s work. I loved playing with the orchestra, but I think I was drawn towards, rather than just rendering the one part from within the orchestra, I wanted to be more involved with the creation of the whole product.”
St. Petersburg Opera auditions professional opera singers from all over the world – Sforzini travels to New York every year to hear them – and has become one of the city’s brightest and most consistent cultural beacons.
He still plays the bassoon – he’s also a composer – but opera, Sforzini explains, had been calling his name for a long time. He just needed to listen.
“Through my musical training, there were a lot of references to opera and voices, and in my musical journey I’d had a lot of opportunities to be involved with opera as a bassoonist. So it wasn’t really so much a surprise.
“I think in retrospect, a lot of things happened early in my life that were actually preparing me to do this one day.”
Tickets and info here.
Here’s the full audio interview with Mark Sforzini:
