Meet February's Guest Conductor Sabatino Vacca

Sabatino Vacca is the Founder, Artistic Director, and Chorus Master of the newly formed Southern Ontario Lyric Opera (SOLO). He has been the Music Director of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra (CSO) since 2007, and helped found the Milton Philharmonic Orchestra in 2014. Sabatino led the Etobicoke Philharmonic Orchestra as Music Director from 2010 to 2017. SOLO debuted in concert in 2015, and followed with productions of La Traviata, Tosca, La Bohème, Pagliacci, Gianni Schicchi, Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro, Madama Butterfly, and in concert with world-renowned Canadian Soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, and Measha Brueggergosman-Lee. The CSO led by Sabatino has accompanied Ben Heppner, Richard Margison, Gary Relyea, and others in concert. He conducted an all-Tchaikovsky programme at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. Sabatino has also conducted orchestras in the Czech Republic, Symphony Hamilton, the Cathedral Bluffs Symphony, the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra, the Brampton Symphony Orchestra, the Rose Orchestra, and the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Orchestra. For Opera York he served as Artistic Director from 2004 to 2016. He was on staff with Opera Hamilton and has worked as an opera coach for the University of Toronto, Laurier University, as well as the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Sabatino is the recipient of the Spirit of Ontario Award for the Arts by the National Congress of Italian Canadians. He was recently inducted into the Alumni Gallery at McMaster University.  

Sabatino is a versatile arranger writing in various styles and for ensembles big and small. His arrangements for the multi-media presentation "Children of a Vanished World" produced by Judy Kopelow as a commemoration to the children of the Holocaust were performed in Hamilton, Toronto, and Waterloo.  It was also performed at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara as part of their Arts and Lectures Series.