This Is Bellini, Not Shakespeare, in Love

There is a lot in a name at the opera these days. The company still known as L.A. Opera at the beginning of the season, and once known as Los Angeles Music Center Opera, is now officially Los Angeles Opera. And its latest production, for which the company uses the English title “The Capulets and the Montagues” (the opera is known in Italian as “I Capuleti e i Montecchi”), is a Romeo and Juliet, but it is not the “Romeo and Juliet.”

Bellini’s opera, rarely seen but the subject of a new production unveiled at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Wednesday night, is a fascinating work. When the opera premiered in Venice in 1830, Shakespeare’s works were just beginning to reach Italy, so the libretto by Felice Romani was based, instead, on the same 16th century sources that Shakespeare knew. Musicologists doubt that Bellini had yet encountered Shakespeare’s play.

By Shakespearean standards this “Capulets” might seem a rather plain account of the Western world’s most famous and most often embellished love story. Gone is much of the color of Verona life. Romani’s libretto follows convention already old-fashioned in its day. Bellini made Romeo a woman’s role, the “breeches-part” hero another dying Italian tradition. The opera is the only one of Bellini’s written in haste, and much of the music is a reworking of numbers from earlier operas. There is minimal character development.

But what there is, instead, is a gripping focus on the love of Romeo and Juliet. Bellini’s greatness was for the tender unfurling of lyric melancholic melody, and in “The Capulets,” the first flush of the composer’s maturity, it is unfurled by the yard. And Los Angeles Opera has found two alluring singers who do an excellent job of convincing us that nothing else around them matters.

Laura Claycomb, who sings Juliet (Giulietta), is a soprano on the verge of a major career. She is the rare specialist in Italian bel canto who also has a taste for the modern, having appeared in Peter Sellars’ production of Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre” in Salzburg and on the new recording of it. She was the brilliant last-minute replacement for Dawn Upshaw in the premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Sappho Fragments” at the Ojai Festival in June. She has Botticellian looks, is an affecting actress and pours forth in Bellini touching melodic lines like soft, shiny molten solder.

Her Romeo is the boyishly ardent Susanne Mentzer, whose amber, flexible mezzo-soprano is a useful contrast to Claycomb’s silvery soprano. Although a travesti Romeo is a peculiarity (and there have been experiments transposing the role down for a tenor), the concept works amazingly well in the opera’s finest scene. As they lay dying, Romeo and Juliet, singing half phrases in the same register, really do seem united in a special love.

The production is updated to early 20th century Italy. Thor Steingraber, who has worked at Los Angeles Opera previously as an assistant director, says in the program book that he wanted to distance the audience from its expectations of Shakespeare, although it could be argued that few classics have been more often updated than “Romeo and Juliet”--is there a teenager left in America for whom Romeo is not Leonardo?

Still, it would not be a difficult leap to accept the Capulets as wealthy captains of industry if the chorus didn’t look quite so Gilbert and Sullivan, especially as the men earnestly carry their chairs on and off stage with each entrance. The Montagues appear a kind of proto-fascistic militia. The sets by Robert Israel are postmodern and minimal--modular columns and boldly painted backdrops--and though attractive are clumsily lit. Two ballet dancers, choreographed by Hope Clarke, impersonate Romeo and Juliet whenever there is a stray bit of instrumental music.

David Miller was over-eager as the swaggering Tybalt (Tebaldo); but Malcolm MacKenzie proved a sympathetic Lawrence (Lorenzo, here a doctor); and Eric Halvarson is effectively harsh as Juliet’s father (Capellio). Richard Hickox conducted with pillowy support for the singers but without a strong sense of rhythmic definition.

Ultimately anything that diverts attention from Romeo and Juliet is a distraction, and this new production is only partially brave enough to accept that condition. But Los Angeles Opera has found two lead singers fine enough that they accomplish it all by themselves.

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* “The Capulets and the Montagues” repeats Saturday at 1 p.m., Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 23 at 1 p.m., Oct. 28 and 31 at 7:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $27-$146, (213) 972-8001.