Susan Howard
Susan Howard has always loved music, especially classical and jazz. “But listening to opera on the radio or recordings did nothing for me. When I finally attended a live performance, Tosca, I was hooked for life. The intensity of emotions, drama, tragedy all made me feel more alive.”
“Now I can listen to opera and feel all the emotions without the visual – it’s the music that brings me back to the first time I attended a live performance.”
She especially loves that SPO brings opera to our schools. “Pinocchio productions are so fantastic – the children love it.”
She is moved to support St. Pete Opera because, “Frankly, Maestro Sforzini is so remarkable, brilliant, approachable, talented and liakable. I feel honored to help him and SPO maintain itself long into the future.”
Jo-Ann Hammack
Since her childhood, Jo-Ann Hammack has been devoted to Opera as an art-form. Through her career as a clinical social worker, and then as a plant nursery owner, she has nurtured that devotion. But in retirement, her devotion has transformed into determination that St. Pete Opera continue to inspire the same devotion for years to come.
As a child, she grew up listening to opera on the radio. On Saturdays, she and her father would be riveted by live broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday matinees.
Jo-Ann met a woman who shared that love of opera, Norma Quance, whose mother adored opera and they became long-term partners.
Wherever Jo-Ann and Norma lived in Florida, they found opera companies to patronize. “You start going, and it becomes part of your life.” First in the Miami-Dade area, later Orlando, but when she moved to Seminole in 2014, she soon discovered Mark Sforzini and the brand-new St. Pete Opera. Right away she recognized the talent of the new company. “Mark has so much potential.”
“We were there all along,” Jo-Ann speaking of the early days. At first, she was a loyal patron, but when Norma developed Alzheimer’s, the idea bloomed that donating to SPO would be a tribute to Norma. “It was my way of keeping Norma connected to this world. I started giving a little and them substantially more after Norma’s death. Jo-Ann asserts, “I want it (SPO) to survive.”