CAPSULE REVIEW : Music Center Opera Opens With a Troubled ‘Fidelio’

Inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday, the Music Center Opera opened its fifth ambitious season with the glorious pathos of “Fidelio.”

Outside the Pavilion, the performance-artist Tim Miller and numerous colleagues, all clad in striped prison garb, staged their own ironic overture to Beethoven’s ode to freedom. It was an agitprop demonstration protesting governmental interference in the arts. In many ways, the political action on the plaza proved more compelling than the political action on the stage.

Gotz Friedrich, the celebrated director from Berlin, wrote in a program note that “Fidelio” “takes place wherever and whenever terrorism and violence threaten mankind.” He saw “no basic demand to update the piece” from the 18th-Century Spain envisioned by the composer. If only he had the courage of his aesthetic convictions.

He placed the action in a stylized prison courtyard, dominated by movable black-brick walls and a central, all-too-modern guard tower. The prisoners had to be concentration-camp inmates. Leonore, disguised as the hardy hero, sported blue jeans. The villainous Don Pizarro, who came equipped with de rigueur shades, resembled a spidery fusion of Nosferatu and a Storm Trooper. Marzelline, the erstwhile soubrette, underwent erotic paroxysms when she declared her yearning for Fidelio. Jacquino became a nasty, leather-jacketed thug.

One must admire Friedrich’s probing intellect. Sometimes, unfortunately, he seems inclined to probe too far in the wrong direction.

The theatrical excesses of his “Fidelio” could have been mitigated by inspired musical impulses. On this occasion, inspiration turned out to be painfully scarce.

Jiri Kout, the conductor, slighted the majesty, the sweep and the poignancy of the score in favor of speed for its own breathless sake. The cast looked fine. For the most part, it sounded feeble.

Karan Armstrong--who happens to be married to Friedrich--acted the title role with fine, muted ardor tinged with telling desperation. Her lyric soprano came to grief, however, in the high climaxes. Gary Bachlund sang Florestan with the warm, fervent tone of a bona fide junior Heldentenor , but paced himself badly. Michael Devlin blustered stoically as the Nazi ogre.

Only one principal sustained world-class standards. Matti Salminen defined the usual paternal platitudes with booming basso amplitude, with incisive articulation of the German text and with hearty if not too folksy generosity of spirit. He towered above his colleagues, both literally and figuratively. If only the opera were called “Rocco.”

A complete review runs in Thursday’s Calendar section.