His ‘Bluebeard’ Will Leave It to Your Imagination : Music: Kent Nagano leads the L.A. Philharmonic in the Bartok opera tonight at the Performing Arts Center.

Which is more exciting: an opera with elaborate sets, costumes and plenty of dramatic action? Or a concert version of the same opera, without sets or costumes, and where the principals barely move?

In some cases, including Bela Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” (A Kekszakallu Herceg Vara), the answer is not as easy as it would seem.

“When I was introduced to ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ it was in a book,” said Kent Nagano, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a performance of the Hungarian composer’s opera and other works tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. “Reading it, just quietly, I was so scared, so terrified. I had nightmares.

“Several years later, I saw the animated film,” said Nagano, between rehearsals in Los Angeles. “It was scary too, but nowhere near as horrific as my imagination. If you are able to follow the text, your imagination can create your own staging, your own drama, your own setting. The human imagination can be far more terrifying than anything you can see on stage.”

Also on the Philharmonic Society of Orange County program are Mendelssohn’s Overture in C for Winds, Op. 24, and the Suite No. 2 from Ravel’s ballet “Daphnis et Chloe.” For Bartok’s one-act opera, mezzo-soprano Ildiko Komlosi sings the role of Judith, and bass Kolos Kovats is Bluebeard; both soloists are Hungarian.

Nagano is conductor of the Opera de Lyon in France, the Halle Orchestra in Manchester, England, and the Berkeley Symphony in California, where he began his career. Kovats is featured on a Decca recording of “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Sir Georg Solti and in a BBC film of the opera. Komlosi has made a specialty of the role of Judith and has been a lead singer with the Hungarian State Opera since 1983.

Komlosi also prefers the concert version.

“For selfish reasons, maybe,” Komlosi, 36, said. “Then I can really give my Judith without the influence of any stage director, of somebody else’s Judith. It’s also somehow deeper. Without movement, without outside things, the role lives better on the inside, and this you can hear also in the voice. You can play with your eyes more, your face. The only thing you have is your personality, and your stage presence, and your Judith.”

The last local performance of “Bluebeard’s Castle” was at a concert led by Pierre Boulez at UCLA’s Royce Hall in 1989; the Metropolitan Opera staged it the same year in New York.

In Hungary, according to Komlosi, who now lives in Rome, the work is downright popular.

“Very popular,” Komlosi said. “First of all, it’s in Hungarian. The librettist [Bela Balazs] is a famous writer in Hungary. Because it’s Bartok’s only opera, it is always in the repertory. When some famous person or politician is coming, it’s on.”

Komlosi’s background gives her at least one advantage over most aspiring Judiths.

“I heard a couple of wonderful performances recently where they were really singing beautiful lines, everything you want, musically almost perfect,” she said. “But what gives you a plus is to live with your language. You can play with the language. You are allowed to do things that the others don’t dare to do.”

In Costa Mesa, English and Hungarian texts will be inserted into the program. (The Performing Arts Center lacks the capability to use the computer-generated supertitles that were used during a performance in Los Angeles on Thursday.)

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One of the prime attractions of “Bluebeard’s Castle,” apart from its the powerful and brilliantly orchestrated score, is its dark psychological underpinnings: Bluebeard warns his last wife that there are doors in his household that should never be opened. In the opera, unlike the fairy tale, the horror is internalized; there are no severed heads.

“Like all legends, you can relate on several levels,” Nagano said. “Legends become legends because they are so universal. They supersede time. The turmoil and conflicts are quite contemporary.

“We see events, both between Judith and Bluebeard and within themselves, that every person can relate to through experience,” he said. “Someone thinking they can influence another person to the point that they can really preclude a change--so many times in various interhuman relationships we think we can do that, and many times we are sorely mistaken. We also have the uncanny ability to see what we want to see . . . .

“These are superficial aspects, taking the story at face value, without mentioning the more profound intrahuman relationship. It is often said that Judith and Bluebeard are part of each one of us as we struggle to make decisions, to resolve internal conflicts.”

Komlosi takes the story at face value but is no less resonant for that.

“It’s the whole thing about women and men, the relationships,” she said. “How far you can go. How you discover the doors, the richness of a personality, how you can win it and how you can lose.”

How far can you go?

“Not as far as Judith went.”

* Guest conductor Kent Nagano leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in works by Mendelssohn, Ravel and Bartok, tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain, 8 p.m. $10-$47. Ticketmaster, (714) 740-2000.