L.A. Opera Will Grow, but Will It Mature?

Los Angeles Opera, under Placido Domingo, will grow. It must. In 2003, when Disney Hall opens, the company will no longer share the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the Los Angeles Philharmonic but will be the hall’s principal tenant.

It is, I think, safe to say that Domingo’s star power, his ability to draw audiences and fund-raising potential, were strong arguments for making him artistic director. The company is bearish.

But what will Los Angeles Opera be besides bigger?

Right now the company doesn’t project a strong vision. It has, for several seasons, scaled back its more venturesome projects. On any individual night, an audience may witness a perfectly respectable performance of a work worth attending. Occasionally it will get more, even much more. Occasionally it will have its time wasted. And that makes Los Angeles no different from San Francisco, Houston or Chicago. And yet the companies in those cities all have stronger personalities than Los Angeles Opera.

Houston has made a name for itself in finding interesting directors and in creating new work, some of it radical. Chicago gets publicity for its advocacy of American work and can also come up with particularly stellar casts. San Francisco, too, boasts stronger casting than Los Angeles; it has a very good music director in Donald Runnicles and has a strong Wagner tradition--a prerequisite in the opera sweepstakes. And in 2001, SFO will get a new general director, Pamela Rosenberg, who has made the Stuttgart Opera one of the most innovative in Germany.

Washington Opera, a company close in size to Los Angeles Opera that Domingo has run for four years, has a less distinct stamp. Domingo has certainly improved it with better productions, more ambitious repertory, stronger singers and conductors. His personality shows up most, however, in his inclusion of his own favorite neglected operas; this season it was Massenet’s “Le Cid.”

But it almost goes without saying that Domingo alone cannot give a company character. He has too many other careers--as singer, conductor, Three Tenors tenor and all-around celebrity. He travels extensively, but his schedule is fixed around his own appearances; he is not free to simply gad about to see interesting work wherever it may be produced--as a modern impresario must.

He puts family first. His wife, Marta Domingo, has already directed productions of “La Traviata” and “La Rondine” at Los Angeles Opera this season and last. There is no word yet about a role for his curvaceous granddaughter, who posed nude for a Playboy spread last month.

Domingo is, however, in a unique position to make things happen through his friends. He is close to conductor Valery Gergiev, the Kirov Opera dynamo, and we can expect to see Gergiev here regularly. Next season was programmed by Peter Hemmings before Domingo was appointed artistic director, but the tenor managed to insert into Hemmings’ schedule a concert of Wagner performances he will sing with Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra during the opening week of the season in September.

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Nevertheless, Domingo’s ultimate success will necessarily be determined by how well he delegates authority and by the excellence of his appointments. Ironically, his fame and insanely busy schedule may allow him more latitude here than Hemmings had--but it also puts more armor around him than existed around the often restrained Hemmings, who was at least approachable and present. The most significant Domingo appointment thus far has been of Edgar Baitzel as artistic administrator; it is he who will handle the day-to-day business of running the company. And unlike Hemmings, who oversaw all aspects of the company, Domingo will not control the finances. That responsibility has been handed over to former board member Ian White-Thomson, who assumes the newly created post of executive director and is thus a coequal with Domingo.

Those with knowledge of the company have already described some surprising turns of events. It became known in the fall that Domingo had asked Kent Nagano to be music director. But then the Deutsche Oper in Berlin announced Nagano’s appointment as its music director, and it was assumed that the conductor--a Bay Area resident who is a major operatic presence in Europe--was no longer in the L.A. picture. In fact, Nagano never accepted the Berlin post, and sources say that Nagano is still in discussions here. His presence would undoubtedly provide the company with exactly the conspicuous artistic profile it needs.

It has also been said by sources close to Esa-Pekka Salonen and Peter Sellars that Domingo (who recently recorded Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” with Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic) would like the conductor and director once more involved on a regular basis with the company. They are a hot ticket at the great festivals and in the great houses of Europe, but their notable productions of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and Gyorgy Ligeti’s “The Grand Macabre” are unknown in their home base.

It is also expected that Domingo will make Hollywood connections with the company. He is comfortable in the film and entertainment worlds--he is the executive producer of “The Other Conquest,” a recent Mexican feature produced by his son, Alvaro. And any arts enterprise wants a piece of the Hollywood action, as a source of talent, of fashionable audiences and of fabulously wealthy donors.

But Hollywood is a dangerous place, as Australian director Bruce Beresford’s careless recent production of “Rigoletto,” set in a decadent Tinseltown, demonstrated. Movie-making in Hollywood is a business, not an artistic endeavor (Beresford’s latest film, “Double Jeopardy,” being a typical example), and perhaps it should be Los Angeles Opera that offers artistic guidance to our broader culture, not the other way around. Indeed, the more interesting route may be from opera to the movies--consider the exceptional vision and poetry of first-time movies by opera directors Julie Taymor (“Titus”) and Deborah Warner (“The Last September”), to say nothing of beautifully made films by such noted opera men as Patrice Chereau (“Queen Margot”) or Nicholas Hytner (“The Madness of King George”).

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What Hollywood should surely be tapped for is its tech expertise. Los Angeles Opera productions are rarely technically advanced, and Hollywood’s wizardry and special effects could certainly liven things up on stage.

But all we know for certain is that Domingo does not live by other people’s rules or expectations. Were that so, he would not be doing all the things he does (will he open an L.A. branch of Domingo, his Spanish restaurant in Manhattan?) and at the same time, still be singing as much as he does, to say nothing of as well as he does, as he approaches 60. *