Poignant ‘Stiffelio’ Opens Season : Opera review: Placido Domingo brings intensity and finesse to the title role in Verdi’s seldom-performed work.

The Music Center Opera won’t celebrate its actual 10th anniversary for another year. Nevertheless, Peter Hemmings’ intrepid company is officially spending all of 1995-96 in commemoration of what is billed as its 10th-anniversary season .

The festivities began Thursday, amid the usual opening-night hoopla, with a genuinely unusual and unusually demanding rarity, Verdi’s “Stiffelio.”

It was a terrific night at the opera. A night of discovery and stimulation. A night for thinking as well as basking in melody.

“Stiffelio” isn’t exactly a household title, even among scholarly name-dropping aficionados. It isn’t exactly a masterpiece. Never mind. Attention must be paid.

Verdi wrote it when he was 36. “Rigoletto” loomed large on his developmental horizon. The premiere in 1850 fell short of a triumph--the religious libretto troubled both censors and audiences--and posterity wasn’t exactly kind. The beleaguered opus has undergone serious reassessment, however, in recent years.

Covent Garden exhumed it in 1993 under the enlightened musical as well as musicological guidance of Edward Downes (the British conductor, not the American quiz-master). Jose Carreras undertook the grateful if essentially unromantic title role, a minister who must confront the infidelity of his wife. Elijah Moshinsky, the inventive director, took the bold but reasonable step of moving the action from the quaint Austrian Salzbach, circa 1800, to what looks like the barren American Midwest, circa 1870.

The subsequent Metropolitan Opera version, led by James Levine, adopted a more traditional approach. Placido Domingo sang the tortured hero within a handsome, relatively literal stage apparatus devised by Giancarlo del Monaco.

The Music Center Opera--which has yet to muster such standard Verdi fare as “Aida,” “Il Trovatore” and “La Forza del Destino”--imported the conductor, sets, costumes and concept of the London “Stiffelio.” But the local cast was dominated by two veterans of the New York edition: Domingo served, of course, as the tenoral preacher, and Vladimir Chernov, the splendid Russian baritone, returned as his honor-obsessed, ultimately murderous father-in-law.

The score, admittedly, has its share of old-fashioned oom-pah-pah formulas--starting with an endless potpourri overture dominated by a rinkytink trumpet. The easy cliches mingle, however, with progressive inspirations: introspective arias that define character as well as mood, arching ensembles that fuse conflicting emotions while propelling the plot.

Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto, based on Souvestre and Bourgeois’ “Le Pasteur, ou L’Evangile et le Foyer,” is a rather convoluted, rather stilted, rather unbalanced structure that sets a stark Protestant love-ethic against rapturous Catholic sensibilities. Still, it provided Verdi with an effective and affecting springboard for intimate reflection at one moment, for grandiose confrontation at another.

The Music Center production manages to stress the inherent strengths while minimizing the inherent weaknesses. This is an amazingly vital exhumation.

Downes, whose only previous American engagement was a “Fidelio” in San Diego, conducts with equal care for lyrical expansion and dramatic flair, and with passion that never precludes precision (a few orchestral infelicities notwithstanding). In the process, he accompanies the singers with reassuring sympathy.

Moshinsky’s staging scheme, re-created here by David Edwards, focuses the basic crisis of faith with strikingly urgent images that allow no room for lazy operatic manners. Every step, every gesture is carefully motivated.

Michael Yeargan’s sets reinforce the aura of brooding danger poetically, even if credibility is compromised by a couple of odd details. The same wall, symbolically decorated with a stuffed fox devouring a sad bird, adorns Stiffelio’s home and his chapel; the stifling realism of the interior scenes is contradicted by a stylized daguerreotype vista that serves as backdrop for the second-act graveyard.

Paul Pyant’s lighting design plays tellingly with form and shadow. Peter J. Hall’s muted costumes invoke Civil War conflicts as they reinforce character. It would have been thoughtful, incidentally, if the management had deemed it worth mentioning in the program that some liberties had been taken with time and place.

Verdi made heavy demands--sometimes declamatory, sometimes florid--on his singers. The Los Angeles cast meets those demands honorably, if not always easily.

Domingo brought extraordinary intensity to the plaints of the tortured hero, and extraordinary poignancy to his insecurities. The tenor sang, moreover, with the plangency of a fine Otello coupled with the legato finesse of a fine Duke of Mantua. The recent reports of his vocal distress are wholly unwarranted. That’s a relief.

Elena Prokina--the Russian soprano cast as Lina, Stiffelio’s momentarily unfaithful and eminently remorseful wife--does not command the dramatic-coloratura resources Verdi so unreasonably demanded. Her soft-edged spinto tones sometimes curdle under pressure, and sometimes turn flat in ascending passages. She conveyed the heroine’s desperation with total sensitivity, however, and sang with increasing freedom and beauty--especially in pianissimo phrases--as the evening progressed.

Chernov looked too young and dashing to pass as her aging, raging father. He ennobled Stankar’s cantilena, however, with solid rolling tone, with rare dynamic refinement, and, in the marvelous cabaletta of Act II, with climactic gusto.

Jonathan Mack held his own with crisp fervor as Raffaele, the cad who seduced the pastor’s wife. Kenneth Cox bathed the self-righteous platitudes of old Jorg in craggy basso tone. Tihana Herceg and Daniel Ebbers brought distinction to comprimario duties, the former more mellifluous than the latter.

The dressy first-nighters didn’t quite fill the house. This, after all, wasn’t “La Traviata.” But the enthusiasm level was amazingly high. There may be hope.