FALL PREVIEW : Our Critics’ Guide to the Season : The ‘Case’ for L.A. Opera

Three contrasting works open the 1992-93 season of Los Angeles Music Center Opera. Of strongest interest is the new “Makropulos Case,” a co-production with Deutsche Oper Berlin of Janacek’s dramatic thriller.

Karan Armstrong takes the title role; the conductor is Jiri Kout (who led the company’s “Kat’a Kabanova”), the stage director Matthias Remus. Production designs are the handiwork of the eminent Andreas Reinhardt.

In case you missed the well-remembered New York City Opera production (seen here in the 1970s), Emilia Marty, the heroine, has discovered the secret of living long; as the curtain rises, she is still young and beautiful at 327. . . . Opening night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is Tuesday, with four more performances, through Sept. 24.

Opening night at Los Angeles Philharmonic this fall brings a new music director to the podium. He is, of course, the long-designated Esa-Pekka Salonen, and on Oct. 8 he conducts the first of four consecutive performances of Mahler’s Third Symphony (with mezzo-soprano Birgitta Svenden as soloist) in the Pavilion of the Music Center. He will remain in residence for another four weeks, returning in February.

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, after warming up in September with three operatic gigs at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, opens its own season Oct. 23 in Royce Hall at UCLA.

Led by incoming music director Christof Perick--this is his official starting-concert--the 24-year-old ensemble will play the world premiere of Mel Powell’s “Settings,” Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and, with Anne Akiko Meyers as soloist, Mozart’s G-major Violin Concerto. This program will be repeated the next night when the orchestra begins its Ambassador Auditorium season.

A controversial work, Paul McCartney’s love-it-or-hate-it “Liverpool Oratorio,” opens the 37th season of the Master Chorale of Orange County, led in this decade by the veteran chorale builder William Hall.

The Oct. 24 performance marks the West Coast premiere of the much-admired, much-reviled 100-minute work, which critic Andrew Porter called an “honestly communicative oratorio” as well as one during which he “became bored.” More standard fare marks the rest of the chorale’s year (a Christmas program; Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion; Beethoven’s Mass in C).

Controversies of other kinds may arise when Long Beach Opera essays Bizet’s “Carmen” for the second time in three performances, Nov. 7, 11 and 15, in 800-seat Center Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center. The ever-enterprising Michael Milenski, founding father of Long Beach Opera, has engaged the young American mezzo-soprano Alice Baker--in recent seasons based in Europe--for the title role but declined to announce other casting. Steven Sloane, a Long Beach regular, will conduct; stage director will be Brian Kulick, who staged the company’s “Pelleas et Melisande” in 1991; Mark Wendland, designer of that “Pelleas,” will also create this production, which will be sung in English.

Perick returns to Music Center Opera to conduct the five-performance run of Richard Strauss’ beloved “Ariadne auf Naxos,” opening Dec. 9 in the Pavilion of the Music Center. Sopranos Ealynn Voss (Ariadne) and Gwendolyn Bradley (Zerbinetta) and tenor Gary Bachlund (Bacchus) lead the cast. Stephen Lawless will be stage director; the production is Wolfram Skalicki’s. The run ends Dec. 19.

Then, on Dec.17, the highly respected, 80-year-old German conductor Kurt Sanderling returns to the podium of the L.A. Philharmonic for four performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Scheduled vocal soloists are Sylvia McNair, Susan Quittmeyer, Vinson Cole and Bryn Terfel.