COMMENTARY : Still Not the Mighty Met, But . . . : Opera is maturing in Southern California’s onetime wasteland. Despite a memorable season, it still needs nurturing to bloom

Southern California used to be an operatic wasteland. Sophisticates enjoyed pointing out that plastic La-La Land boasted swimming pools where other cities had culture. The world laughed--with justification, alas--at our pretensions.

The scoffers aren’t quite so noisy anymore. Not, at least, when it comes to what Henry Fothergill Chorley called the most irrational of art forms. (Now the out-of-town elitists just put us down--with continuing justification, alas--for ignoring ballet.)

This season, discerning followers of the lyric muse visited Southern California to see David Hockney’s sets for “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” to experience the rarity of Placido Domingo in an authentic zarzuela, to make the acquaintance of an unheralded world-class Brunnhilde from London, to witness the original “Boris Godunov” in a stark modern-dress staging, and to savor the impact of a contemporary music-drama from Mexico.

We must be doing a few things right. Opera is now flourishing, after a limited fashion, from conservative but feisty San Diego to glamorous Los Angeles, with cautious but lavish Costa Mesa and adventurous but poverty-stricken Long Beach active in between.

It isn’t perfect, of course. Compared to the mighty Met, which coexists with the less-mighty New York City Opera next door at Lincoln Center, the seasons here are short. Compared to San Francisco and Chicago, the seasons are sporadic.

But we do have opera seasons. Where there’s money, there’s hope.

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It isn’t over, they say, until the calorically challenged woman sings. Never mind that Bartlett cites the original politically incorrect bromide about the fat lady in connection with church, not opera. And, while you’re at it, never mind that most sopranos aren’t overweight these days or that very few of them outside Orange County still wear the breastplates and winged helmets cartooned by tradition. Some cliches die hard.

No fewer than three sopranos--all slender--signaled the final operatic cadence for 1993-94 in Los Angeles. That happened just a Sunday ago when the curtain fell on the last performance of “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. If the preceding offerings had been as successful as this updated version of Richard Strauss’ bittersweet comedy, one could claim without fear of contradiction that opera is alive and well in L.A.

As the immortal Vito Sportivo would have noted, however, it ain’t necessarily so. The operatic work here isn’t always uplifting. Sometimes, despite the energetic hustle of local cheerleaders, it’s pretty grim.

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The Music Center Opera season began shakily in September with an overdressed, distractingly overstressed, fussily superficial production of “La Boheme,” the company’s second. We used to think Puccini’s sentimental indulgence was fool-proof. We were wrong.

Peter Hemmings, the resident impresario, entrusted the staging to a misplaced movie director, the conducting to a misplaced tenor (guess who), and the stage to an ensemble of misplaced lightweights.

The decors looked too realistic and too ponderous for their own good. Too expensive, too.

At least they were new. For “Un Ballo in Maschera,” which followed, Hemmings borrowed tattered sets from Covent Garden in faraway London. The trans-Atlantic trip hardly seemed necessary. Compounding the inherent problems, two different casts left vocal standards erratic.

One searched in vain for a unifying dramatic perspective amid isolated virtues. And one longed for expressive vitality. This was rote Verdi, routine Verdi.

Matters improved in October with “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” the first of two Strauss operas in a badly balanced seven-opera season. Hockney’s whimsical dream-color designs magnetized attention even when they contradicted the sobriety of the libretto as well as the profundity of the score. Luckily, with Ellen Shade, Gwyneth Jones, Jane Henschel and Franz Grundheber in central roles, much of the singing held its own against the scenery.

Randall Behr, resident maestro for all seasons and sometimes dubious reasons, confounded the skeptics (this one included) who would have preferred a high-powered bona fide specialist in the pit for Strauss’ heroic convolutions. Sometimes phlegmatic, obviously intelligent and, at the very least, reliable, he had been scheduled to return in January for the first major production in America of Manuel Penella’s “El Gato Montes.” For some reason, however, the baton passed to Miguel Roa of the Teatro Lirico Nacional in Madrid. Authenticity was thus ensured.

At a time when companies everywhere can afford few financial risks, the exhumation of Penella’s minor opus, written in 1916, didn’t exactly seem imperative. Many a more important 20th-Century opera still languishes in neglect. No matter. Whatever Placido wants, Placido gets.

In this instance, the tenorissimo who officially serves Music Center Opera as artistic consultant wanted, and got, a grateful personal vehicle. It didn’t hurt, moreover, that the vehicle might seem attractive to Los Angeles’ large Latino community, a community usually disenfranchised by our cultural Establishment.

Luckily, “El Gato” purred with reasonably crafty verismo ardor--the hand-me-down variety. And the performance turned out to be both poignant and stylish, if hardly earth-shattering. The shattering of earth came, not incidentally and all too literally, with the quake that rattled everyone’s composure during the local run (one performance in Orange County followed by six in Los Angeles).

Behr returned in February, as did Puccini, with a dull and dutiful revival of the troubled “Madama Butterfly” introduced here in 1991. Even with Christopher Harlan correcting some of the directorial gaffes originally committed by Ian Judge, this easy exercise proved that one can get too much of a mediocre thing.

Next on the agenda, in April, was another lazy though cost-efficient effort, a revival of the 1990 production of “Le Nozze di Figaro.” This time, a patently uneven cast found its best efforts compromised by an insensitive, inexperienced and, it turned out, inappropriate conductor.

Once again, one left the Music Center disturbed by the quality of musical leadership. Most of the conductors employed here are competent. But--and it’s a big but --they are seldom much more than that (and the gentleman in charge of “Figaro” was less). Again and again one misses the forceful, illuminating, elevating impulses that should emanate from the pit. It is a matter of managerial priorities.

Jiri Kout manned the podium for “Rosenkavalier.” He isn’t a symphonic superstar. He certainly isn’t in a class with Kleiber, Davis, Abbado, Muti, Solti, Sawallisch, Dohnanyi, Mackerras, Haitink or Levine (the sort of conductor we never see in Los Angeles). He hasn’t invariably earned unbridled cheers in the past; his “Rosenkavalier” at the Munich Festival in 1988, in fact, sounded square, even dowdy. On this happy occasion, however, he turned out to be an enlightening force, reminding us that routine need not be a dirty word.

The cast at his disposal--led by Frederica von Stade, Ashley Putnam and an impressive newcomer from Stuttgart bearing the intriguing name of Helmut Berger-Tuna--was strong. The controversial production, borrowed from the English National Opera, turned out to be stimulating even when it flirted with perversity.

The perversity related to the now trendy custom of playing the action not in the period intended by composer and librettist but in the period of the opera’s composition. Ergo, this unconventional “Rosenkavalier” took place circa 1910 rather than 1740.

The concept belonged in this case to Jonathan Miller, but, as is too often the case with Music Center Opera, the director was busy with more important projects elsewhere. Here, his duties fell by default to an assistant. Fortunately, David Ritch proved himself a masterly assistant.

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The ongoing problems with Los Angeles opera do not seem to change. The repertory is ridiculously lopsided. The company has mustered only one work by Wagner, a “Tristan” back in 1987, and no Russian opera at all. There seems to be no consistent policy regarding staging styles, and lend-lease programs have become a dangerous habit. Too few productions originate here.

To say that casting standards fluctuate belabors the painful. A relative novice is often sent in to do a star’s job.

The same operas come back, and back, with frequency that contradicts artistic logic. Next season, for example, we will get Verdi’s “Otello” for the third time since 1986, while the same composer’s “Aida” remains an unfulfilled promise. Strauss’ “Elektra,” presented as recently as 1991, returns prematurely, with Behr taking over the podium. Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” returns after only a two-year absence.

We can blame many of the vagaries and inequities on budgetary constraints. These are hard times for the performing arts in general, and Los Angeles is still reeling from a recession. Opera, which demands an elaborate stage apparatus and a huge personnel roster, remains the most costly of all the performing arts. Still, money--or the lack of it--isn’t our only problem.

Some of the most vexing troubles at the Music Center involve aesthetic decisions, not financial limitations. One wonders what will happen when the Philharmonic moves into its new home across the street and the Pavilion becomes a full-time haven for opera (and, one hopes, for ballet).

One wonders, and one worries.

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It was business mostly as usual in 1993-94 for the San Diego Opera, at 29 the oldest active professional company in Southern California. The business wasn’t all that exciting. San Diego audiences are not particularly receptive to novelty. But, with Ian D. Campbell minding the store, the business was always solidly professional and sometimes more than that.

The standards here might be described as high-class regional. The casts juxtapose famous names with those of promising newcomers and reliable utility artists. The productions, usually second- or third-hand, tend to be unabashedly old-fashioned. The local product isn’t what used to be decried as instant opera, but it often resembles hand-me-down opera.

The San Diego season, now confined to the first four months of the year, opened with a cool revival of Tchaikovsky’s “Yevgeny Onegin.” The romantic opus was performed this year in Russian, a language understood neither by the cast nor by a public slavishly attentive to supertitles projected atop the proscenium arch. English would have made better sense, on various levels.

The linguistic alienation called to mind the deathless prose of Edith Wharton, reporting on a turn-of-the-century “Faust” in New York:

“The unalterable and unquestioned law of the music world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

The age of innocence lingers on.

After “Onegin,” San Diego mustered a “Rigoletto” far superior to the Los Angeles version conducted last year by Placido Domingo and staged by his wife, Marta, within the same Washington Opera decors. Other installments in the season down south were an endearing production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” with the Australian diva Deborah Riedel in the tortuous title role, and a not-so-endearing revival of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” in an outdated edition by its plodding conductor, Richard Bonynge.

For five lonely nights in March, however, San Diego actually took some interesting chances. Aiming at the same neglected audience that Los Angeles courted with “El Gato Montes,” the border city offered the U.S. premiere of Daniel Catan’s “La Hija de Rappaccini,” a.k.a. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”

First performed in Mexico City in 1991, this liberal adaptation of Hawthorne’s novel functioned as a reasonably compelling psychological thriller, economically constructed in a mildly modern--that is, gently dissonant--idiom. The performance was appreciative, and the staging even recognized the theatrical possibilities of symbolism and stylization.

San Diego audiences, alas, were not enchanted. No doubt, they would have preferred another “Carmen.”

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Meanwhile, Opera Pacific was busy doing its own essentially provincial thing under the leadership of David DiChiera at the luxurious Performing Arts Center of Costa Mesa. The season here began with a relatively unconventional staging of “Faust” that some observers found fascinating, others just silly. This was followed by a shamelessly fatuous, unredeemably creaky “Merry Widow” and a rather sloppy “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

Lofty vocal standards were a sometime thing. Under little-league conductors, the orchestra concentrated on unobtrusive accompaniment. Theatrical attitudes and platitudes, most from the laissez-faire school, recalled nothing so much as old New Yorker cartoons, but here the wit and whimsy were unintentional.

Just when we thought it was safe to forget about Orange County as an important operatic venue, Costa Mesa swooped in where Los Angeles feared to tread. In March, DiChiera & Co. had their way with Wagner.

The local production of “Die Walkure” looked old-fashioned by current Bayreuth standards, and it could not boast superhuman voices in all the demanding roles. Still, the cast seemed potent at best, dedicated at worst, and a young British soprano named Jane Eaglen made a monumental debut as Brunn-hilde. The Pacific Symphony performed minor miracles for John Mauceri, who ignored the usual time-dishonored cuts.

This wasn’t just another musical charade. This was serious, large-scale opera.

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Meanwhile in Long Beach, the operatic story is short and unsettling. Among the four Southern California impresarios, Michael Milenski works with the shortest season and the smallest budget. He also puts on the most daring, most progressive, often most stimulating productions.

Long Beach deals in opera for the thinking person. Glamour be damned. This, unfortunately, was not the city’s finest operatic year.

It began last summer with an excursion to the Ford Amphitheatre in Cahuenga Pass, where Milenski & Co. put on a “Carmen” that sounded tawdry and looked like a mindless modernist caricature. The aesthetic coup de grace was delivered by the least seductive heroine ever to place hand on hip.

Back home at the Convention Center, John Cage’s “Europas” reinforced the company’s reputation for serving the obscure avant-garde. But some habitues found it reasonable to ask if this experimental happening really belonged in an opera house.

The company found a less controversial challenge in the 1874 version of “Boris Godunov,” dry, uncompromisingly intellectual and unusually acerbic as staged by a resident enfant terrible , Christopher Alden.

If all had gone as planned, the mini-season would have ended in a blaze of humanistic wit as Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser reduced Verdi’s “Falstaff” to an intimate, irreverent 20th-Century comedy. Unfortunately, the rehearsals did not go well. One of the directors found himself oddly at odds with the soprano cast as Alice Ford, who happened to be married to the gentleman cast as Falstaff.

After much acrimony, the prima-donna walked, taking the primo-uomo with her. Desperate to salvage something without destroying the original schedule, Milenski scuttled the staging. Engaging last-minute replacements for the missing principals, he settled for a concert performance of the Shakespearean masterpiece.

The result was hardly a disgrace. Still, timid compromises aren’t part of the lusty Long Beach tradition.

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Maybe next season. . . .