Sarasota Opera celebrates its 50th Season in 2008-2009 with four new productions, a return of its most critically acclaimed production, and an expansion of its season. The company will mount its first fall opera season with five performances of a new production Rossini's perennial The Barber of Seville in November. The company's traditional Winter Opera Festival will return with four more operas in February and March 2009.

Iain Webb and the Sarasota Ballet continue a season of firsts with a program including Tony Award winning choreographer Matthew Bourne's The Infernal Galop from 1989 and a world premiere of Wolfgang for Webb by Dominic Walsh.

After ten months of intense work, the renovation of the Sarasota Opera House will be complete and the theater will reopen on March 1, 2008 with a performance of Verdi's beloved Rigoletto followed by the Grand Re-Opening Gala Celebration.

Pulitzer Prize winning composer Ned Rorem and librettist and poet J.D. McClatchy have been commissioned by Sarasota Opera to write a full-length opera for the Sarasota Youth Opera program. The work will premiere in May 2009 at the Sarasota Opera House. The opera will be based on Winsor McCay's seminal comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland" which ran in the New York Herald and New York American newspapers from 1905 through 1913.

The first season following the $20 million renovation of the Sarasota Opera House will open March 1, 2008 and present 32 performances of four operas in repertory through April 13, 2008. Sarasota Opera will be reopening the newly renovated Sarasota Opera House on March 1, 2008 for a four opera Festival Season with a special emphasis on Verdi.

William and Casiana Schmidt and the William E Schmidt Foundation have pledged a total of $4 million to the building phase of Sarasota Opera's "Building on the Vision" Capital Campaign. This leadership gift is the second largest to the campaign and brings the total amount raised towards the Sarasota Opera House restoration to more than $16 million of the $20 million goal.