When it comes to opera, the 400-plus-year-old form doesn’t seem to have lost an iota of its world-stirring allure (witness Paul Potts’ 16.5 million views on YouTube). When it comes to opera in Miami, the stir and allure are not only alive and well, they’re thriving amid the intimately grand Sanford and Delores Ziff Ballet Opera House.

We’re talkin’ ’bout the Florida Grand Opera — the second oldest and seventh largest opera company in America.

Founded in 1941 as the Opera Guild of Greater Miami, the Florida Grand Opera was formed in ’94 after the merging of the Greater Miami Opera and the Opera Guild of Fort Lauderdale. Now, as then, the company stages some of the best the form has to offer, and, on occasion, even finds time to debut the wholly new. And while Scottish-born maestro Stewart Robertson — now helming his 10th season — isn’t premiering any new composers this year, his retelling of classics is as fresh as the day they were born.

And as triumphant. This season the opera opens with Mozart’s box office blasting buffa Così Fan Tutte, before segueing through Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, and two from Puccini — Tosca and La Boheme. Which means by the time the company flourishes it all up with Handel’s breathtakingly baroque Julius Caeser, Miami will once again be befallen by transcendent tradition, and be beholden to the great good folk who keep it sublimely ashine.

The SunPost trekked out to the Florida Grand Opera’s new Doral digs to chat with Robertson and Justin Moss, managing director of marketing and communication. Here’s how it went down:

Florida Grand Opera always seems to book the big guns — Mozart, Puccini, et al. Is that the best tact?

Stewart Robertson: We try and mix. Basically it’s the well-known names — the Verdis, the Donizettis, the Rossinis — but I think we actually have a duty to do lesser known names too. There’s a lot of good repertory out there that people don’t get a chance to hear. We can’t do that all the time, but we spike our seasons a little bit. Last season we did the world premiere of Anna Karenina. … I myself have conducted three world premieres of three new operas in the past year — one [Wokanda’s Dream] by an American composer named Tony Davis for Opera Omaha; at Glimmerglass I conducted a new opera [The Greater Good] by another American composer, Stephen Hartke. Actually that recording just came out.

Didn’t you also debut something at the Lyric in Chicago?

Robertson: Yes, Orpheus Descending by Bruce Saylor.

Do you see a difference in the crowd between Chicago and Miami?

Robertson: [Chicago is] a bigger opera house in the sense that they present more operas per season. We do five; they do, I think, 12. We do a lot of performances, though.

I noticed that. Don’t you do about a dozen each?

Robertson: Well, between eight and a dozen.

Justin Moss: The standard pattern, the minimum, is six in Miami and two in Fort Lauderdale. And for some of the more popular operas — La Boheme, for example — we can add nonsubscription performances. And for the really popular operas — Traviatta, Boheme, so forth — we can add performances and with no subscription base in the house still just about fill ’em.

That’s great. Do you see your audience getting younger?

Robertson: Increasingly. There’s a very elegant younger set coming to the opera now.

Moss: One of the reasons for this is that for over 30 years we’ve been doing a really intensive outreach program. Every year we mount a fully staged short opera and we go in to almost every high school in Miami-Dade County. In addition, we distribute about 1,000 free passes for the final dress rehearsal, so we have 1,000 high school kids at the final dress. Which means, if you’d gone to high school in Miami, you got exposed to opera at least once, if not several times, and there are people who only need that contact and they connect immediately. 

Robertson: I’ve had people in their 30s and 40s, who are now avid opera-goers, come up to me and say they first saw opera in one of those final dress rehearsals.

Weren’t you nominated for a Grammy?

Robertson: Yes, that was another contemporary opera [The Mines of Sulphur], written in the ’60s by the English composer Richard Rodney Bennett.

Did you have a chance to work with Pavarotti before he died?

Robertson: One time, when I was very, very young. I was 19. I sang in a chorus of an opera by Donizetti, produced at the Edinburgh festival. [Pavarotti] was then a young tenor just beginning to get on the international scene.

Were you here when he played on the Beach?

Moss: Well, he made his American premiere with this company, in 1965… Lucia di Lammermoor, with Joan Sutherland, by the way.

Robertson: Yes, this company has a very distinguished past.

Seems to have quite a distinguished future, too.

Why, thank you.

Florida Grand Opera presents Così Fan Tutte at the Ziff Ballet Opera House

Nov. 17 at 7 p.m.; Nov. 21, 24, 27 and 30 at 8 p.m.; Dec. 2 at 2 p.m.; Dec. 6 and 8 at 8 p.m. For tickets, call the box office at 305-949-6722.