OPERA REVIEW : Modernist Navel-Gazing Amid Long Beach’s Strange Billfellows

When the Long Beach Opera is good, it is very good indeed. Also bright, bold, inventive and stimulating.

When the company is bad, it is pretentious. Also self-conscious, precious, perverse and prone to chronic navel-gazing.

It was navel-gazing time Sunday afternoon at the Center Theater. Michael Milenski, intrepid impresario of the intimate avant-garde, had arranged a shotgun marriage embracing three totally dissimilar song cycles and imposed an oh-so-modern artsy-smartsy staging scheme on each.

The music, for the most part, was wonderful. So was the music-making.

The dramatic overlay, however, added little but claptrap. It was intrusive, irrelevant, superfluous, silly and, worst of all, distracting. At least it wasn’t boring.

The first and most substantial of the vehicles subjected to Long Beach revisionism was Leos Janacek’s “Zapisnik Zmizeleho,” a.k.a. “The Diary of One Who Vanished” (1919). This was followed by Benjamin Britten’s “Les Illuminations” (1939), which paved the mystical way for George Crumb’s “Night of the Four Moons” (1969).

Janacek’s poignant study, based on anonymous poems published in a Brno newspaper, examines the revelations of a young peasant who flees a life of stifling convention after falling in love with a mysterious gypsy woman. Britten’s fragile opus is an abstract ode to the erotic symbolism of Arthur Rimbaud. Crumb’s sparse essay, reputedly inspired by the Apollo 11 mission, focuses on the otherworldly nature-imagery of Federico Garcia Lorca.

Common sense would preclude searching for a common thread to bind these strange billfellows. But that didn’t dissuade the pensive tinkerers in Long Beach.

The tinker-team was headed by Assaf Levine, a young director from the New Israeli Opera, who worked, apparently on a very tight budget, in tandem with the designer Carol Bailey and the lighting expert Adam Silverman. Levine and friends created an all-purpose playing area defined by a chunk of a railroad track, a barbed-wire fence and a blue wall at the rear for the projection of shadows. The basic elements were slightly re-arranged and redecorated as the afternoon wore on.

In Janacek’s “Diary,” the protagonist resembled some sort of latter-day prisoner. His bare chest was enclosed in a leather harness. From time to time, he attached confining straps to the harness. The ambience suggested concentration-camp torture. The gypsy appeared and disappeared behind the barbed-wire fence. The two danced a slow-motion mirror-dance of love. There was a lot of staggering and lurching. The final tableau found the hero pointing a revolver to his head.

Ask not why.

*

The Janacek prisoner returned as a silent partner for the soprano in “Les Illuminations.” She also clutched a revolver. Clad in a crimson negligee, she did a lot of posing on a tiny pedestal, a lot of lounging and crouching, a lot of toying with a white veil and a crimson cloth. She, too, danced an amorous mirror-dance with the Janacek tenor. After a while, he became a corpse, and she wound him in the crimson cloth.

Ask not why.

The Janacek gypsy returned, literally moonstruck, in Crumb’s nocturnal escapade. Perhaps the producers confused it with “Pierrot Lunaire.” The mezzo-soprano was trapped here in a white straitjacket, and she cowered among four strategically placed instrumentalists. The players left the stage one by one, Haydn style, as the final cadence threatened to evaporate.

Ask not why.

It was all very picturesque. For some, no doubt, it was fraught with deep meaning. For others, it was fraught with shallow obfuscation.

The audience in the 800-seat house--rather small at the outset--got smaller as the afternoon progressed. Don’t blame the performers.

Neal Stulberg played the piano most sensitively on behalf of Janacek. He conducted the Britten with perfect sensuality, and brought Crumb’s glittery linear fragments into delicate focus.

Richard Fracker sang Janacek’s songs with extraordinary fervor, and a touch of finesse, too. Unfazed by the acrobatic antics imposed upon her, Suzan Hanson sounded exquisitely poised in the Gallic Britten. Reveka Mavrotis, the dark-toned mezzo-soprano, emerged properly earthy as Janacek’s gypsy, properly ethereal as Crumb’s loony tuner.

* The Long Beach Opera repeats “Three Song Cycles” Wednesday in the Center Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., at 8 p.m. Tickets $22, $40 and $60. (310) 596-5556.