OPERA REVIEW / L.A FESTIVAL : ‘Nixon’ in Nixonland : Music Center: ‘Nixon in China’ may not be a masterpiece, but some operas--like wine and cheese--improve with age.

Even critical ogres can undergo a change of mind. To a degree. After a fashion.

Take the case of “Nixon in China” and this ogre.

He detested the trendy neo-romantic quasi-minimalist semi-revisionist opera at its concert preview in San Francisco. That was back in May, 1987.

He wasn’t much happier at the much-ballyhooed Houston premiere five months later. Even the quirky magic of Peter Sellars’ staging didn’t help much.

John Adams’ keep-on-chugging score still sounded nervous, repetitive and trivial. The recycled operatic conventions still seemed simplistic. The poetic rhymes and political naivete of Alice Goodman’s libretto still tended toward archness and banality.

But tempus fugit . Time wounds all heels, even in the lyric theater and in the wonderful world of newsprint. A production can take on polish and refinement with repetition. Perceptions can sway.

After numerous controversial performances in Brooklyn, Washington, Amsterdam and Edinburgh, not to mention a telecast, a recording and a projected home-video incarnation, “Nixon in China” finally landed in Nixonland on Tuesday. A large, though non-capacity, audience cheered as the President descended the gangway, and it cheered as the curtain fell.

The local premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion--a joint project of the Music Center Opera and the L.A. Festival--suggested that some absences actually can make the critical heart grow fonder. Or at least more tolerant.

Stop. Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a total flip-flop.

“Nixon in China” remains a problematic piece. It remains slick and superficial. It remains a compendium of easy effects, contradictions and cultural cliches. It goes on too long. It sometimes mucks up character definition and muddles historic relationships.

But it seems tighter now. It seems more urgent, more clever and, in some crucial cases, more subtle.

The most drastic changes seem to emanate from the pit. Kent Nagano, the new conductor, finds unexpected expressive undertones and a surprising variety of light and shade in Adams’ lush orchestration.

Nagano musters tension even amid the sprawl. He does everything possible to prevent the dittoed arpeggios and rhythmic ostinatos from sounding mechanical.

He knows exactly how to gauge the mighty climax of the arrival of the Presidential jet and the orgasmic coloratura triumph of Mme. Mao. He savors the obvious but witty Wagnerian quotations in the “Red Detachment” ballet sequence, and sustains order in the multiple-mad-scene that climaxes the dormitory concertato.

Nagano also balances the symphonic, electronic and vocal elements deftly. That task may have been facilitated, of course, by the composer’s strange decision--perhaps it was an admission of defeat--to outfit his cast with body microphones. The decision invited distortion along with amplification.

Sellars’ ever-muted, faintly stylized theatrics are now acutely focused. Unless memory disserves, the inventive director has pointed up the elements of satire. He also has intensified the brutality in Mark Morris’ crafty cartoon ballet--shades of Tian An Men Square--and added layers of complexity to the surrealist wanderings and expirations in the communal dream sequence (a sequence that the innocent librettist had envisioned as a ball scene).

The original cast, mostly selected from Sellars’ private reserve of strolling players, now paints in pastels as well as primary colors. James Maddalena is brash yet befuddled, surprisingly sympathetic and hardly ever shifty as the baritonal Nixon. Carolann Page is vocally luminous, chronically demure yet pathetically troubled as his Pat. Thomas Hannons bumbles engagingly as a basso-buffo Kissinger.

John Duykers is tough yet endearingly cynical as the Heldentenoral Mao. Trudy Ellen Craney exudes menacing authority--political as well as erotic--as his never-blushing bride, and she confronts the high-wire tessitura bravely.

Sanford Sylvan personifies wisdom and poetic restraint as a Chou En-lai who sings with an introspective Brittenesque baritone. Paula Rasmussen, Stephanie Friedman and Stephanie Vlahos perform crisply as the trio of close-harmony secretaries who function as a Greek chorus but might as well be Maoettes.

The ballet non-divertissement is danced with cheeky suavity by Heather Toma, now partnered by the mock-heroic George de la Pena.

The entire Asian contingent, incidentally, has been cast without regard for ethnic authenticity. The problems of Miss Saigon, apparently, do not concern Miss Beijing.

The inevitable supertitles--English “translations” for Goodman’s English text--proved redundant as well as distracting in most cases. But. . . .

They did tell us what Mme. Mao was sputtering and squeaking about way up there in the vocal stratosphere. They did suggest that Goodman’s lines, even when uttered within a normal range, aren’t particularly singable. And they did make one worry, again, about a sensibility that assigns introspective poetry to the homey Nixons, silly platitudes to the intellectual Kissinger and tough-guy asides to the lofty Mao.

The Music Center Opera Chorus--whatever that is--posed, marched and sang valiantly all night long. It took, and delivered, special delight in the tiny “pig-pig-pig-pig” musings that accompany Mrs. Nixon’s tour of a collective farm in the second act. The chorus master’s name was conspicuously absent from the program credits.

When Adams’ lush droning and skittish beeping threatened to become an aural trial, even a stubborn critical ogre could find visual relief in Adrianne Lobel’s spare designs, Dunya Ramicova’s evocative costumes and James F. Ingalls’ flexible lighting scheme. Every minimalist gesture was artfully decorated.

Now, about “The Death of Klinghoffer”. . . .