Caesar Captivated by Songs of Love

Friday, on the eve of Colin Powell’s visit to Egypt, Los Angeles Opera brought Egypt to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The secretary of state’s trip is important business and so, too, should be Handel’s opera “Julius Caesar,” which concerns the Roman emperor’s Alexandrine War and his seduction by Cleopatra. That seduction, traced as it is by Handel with some of the most lavish and entrancing love music in all opera, still serves as an excellent caution against ever underestimating the powerful hold that the Middle East can assert on the world stage.

Caesar and Egypt were both very popular subjects for Italian operas in the 17th and 18th centuries, and they still fascinate composers of our day: Philip Glass has written an operatic paean to Akhnaten, the Egyptian ruler who initiated the worship of a single deity; California’s Lou Harrison, in his opera “Young Caesar,” examines the effect a homosexual encounter had on the ruler’s character. Handel’s version--”Giulio Cesare in Egitto” is its full Italian title--is the story of youth, love and the enduring fight for political control of a crucial region of the world; it might have been pulled directly from today’s headlines.

But for the opera lover, it is something even more important--four full hours of fabulous, ravishing music and a marathon feast of spectacular singing. It is the opera that triggered the 1960s revival of interest in Handel’s stage works, which we now prize as downright Shakespearean in the dramatic reach of their characters.

“Julius Caesar” is also the opera that made a star of Beverly Sills (who was a famed Cleopatra at the New York City Opera). And it is the opera that, in an unforgettable production 15 years ago that treated the emperor as an American president making war in the Middle East, launched the director Peter Sellars to international renown.

The Los Angeles Opera production, which was created by Francisco Negrin for Opera Australia in 1994, is a Postmodern muddle. There is a little bit of this and that. Caesar wears disheveled white Edwardian uniforms with ancient Roman armor. The Egyptians are bald and avant-garde looking, although glamorous Cleopatra is more traditionally Cecil B. DeMille. Perhaps this helps us understand the allure Caesar and Cleopatra have had through the ages, but it also suggests a designer, Anthony Baker, infatuated with secondhand shops.

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Some scenes are specific, such as Cleopatra’s bath, while others are played before mobile slabs decorated with hieroglyphics on one side. A handful of dancers regularly hang around the stage, miming the action. Cleopatra’s eunuch, Nirenus, a minor character, is here an ever-present annoying clown, climbing all over the sets.

The singers bring different stylistic capabilities. Those with voices trained for 19th century opera sing one way; the specialists in Baroque period practice, and especially the three countertenors, sing in another. An early music authority, Harry Bicket, conducts an appropriately lithe orchestra of period instruments inappropriately buried in a Wagnerian-deep pit and making faint noise.

Still, very fine performances emerge. The countertenor Bejun Mehta, an exciting singer and stage presence, is Ptolemy, Cleopatra’s petulant and barbarous brother. The mezzo-soprano Paula Rasmussen brings powerful drama to the pants role of Sextus, who avenges his father’s death by killing Ptolemy. Elizabeth Futral is a gorgeous-voiced Cleopatra. David Daniels is initially a thin-sounding Caesar, but his voice seems to grow in power, and his character gains emotional focus over the long course of the opera.

There are also a few exceptional moments of staging. One is when Caesar, having escaped drowning, rolls onshore, his movement and music in stunning agreement. In the aria “Se in fiorito,” a solo violinist (James Stark) is onstage with Daniels to compete in florid embellishments, and a battle in music becomes an inspired way to show Caesar as a man of action.

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But there are many missed opportunities as well. Each singer seems alone in developing character. Mehta is brilliant in bringing out the amusingly campy immaturity of Ptolemy, but one wishes he could have been directed into turning that amusement into blood-chilling terror.

Futral makes the audience happy with beautiful singing. Negrin, however, sabotages her famous lament, “Piangero,” by placing her far from the audience in shadows, dampening the personal expressivity. She does a sexy disrobing (behind a towel) onstage, but when she walks the plank before the pit, she sings as if still projecting from a distance. Harsh light on a singer’s strained features is hardly glamour’s friend. And could it be that all Nirenus’ hopping about the stage affected countertenor David Walker’s intonation?

Suzanna Guzman, so often impressive in L.A. Opera productions, sounded and acted as if plucked from the wrong era, her voice heavy and with too much vibrato for Bicket’s light-touched phrasing. Still, she could be a moving Cornelia, the murdered Pompey’s long-suffering wife. Bass James Creswell, the rare lower voice in this opera, was a capable Achilla, Ptolemy’s general. The baritone Pablo Porras has little to sing as the Roman tribune Curius.

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Bicket is an authority on this era’s music, and he achieved unusually impressive results from his orchestra, but he could also appear insensitive to theater with some phenomenally fast tempos. Singers were simply forced to stop acting, plant themselves firmly in place and buckle down on their quicksilver passage work. It made for thrilling vocal acrobatics but dulled dramatic tension. Yet, as is the case with all else in this frustrating production, Handel’s music ultimately--if not easily--wins out.

* “Julius Caesar” repeats Tuesday, Friday, Sunday and March 7 at 7:30 p.m. and March 10 at noon, $28-$148. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 972-8001.