L.A. Opera warms up for national stage

It’s been a bewildering, nutty season for Los Angeles Opera.

The company’s two most ambitious and highly anticipated productions had to be canceled. Prokofiev’s epic “War and Peace” fell victim to a donor’s failed stock portfolio. A new version of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea” commissioned from Luciano Berio was not finished when the Italian composer fell ill. Both operas were replaced at the last minute, but the troubles did not stop there.

The sets and costumes for the Prokofiev substitution, Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” were held up by a dock strike, forcing the company to build its own in 10 days. A hastily contrived triple bill of extended operatic excerpts in which Placido Domingo would star as the Monteverdi replacement was threatened when the tenor -- and artistic director of the company -- contracted a bronchial infection. Even arm-twisting French tenor Roberto Alagna to fill in proved a treacherous path when it turned out he didn’t have a visa.

In the end, the shows went on, and when announcing the new season Domingo, undaunted, joked to a Times reporter that at least it hasn’t been boring. Still, it has been disappointing, and you might think that the enterprising tenor would have had enough operatic upheaval. Or at the very least, you might expect the L.A. Opera board, fearing the potential of real disaster, would now clip his wings.

Remarkably, neither is the case. L.A. Opera has just announced an exciting, venturesome season. For 2003-04, the company has assembled an impressive, even daring, lineup of operas and directors. And in doing so, the once solid, stolid L.A. Opera now stands for something, and stands out as a newly important force in American opera.

A major-league contender

Five years ago, no operaphile would think to mention Los Angeles in the same breath as San Francisco and Chicago, American’s second and third opera cities, after New York. But compared with San Francisco Opera’s upcoming 81st season and Lyric Opera’s 49th season, our 17-year-old company looks to become not only their artistic equal next season, but perhaps even a leader.

In the hierarchy of American opera, New York’s Metropolitan looms large. But with more than 4,000 seats to fill seven times a week from September through May, the company takes few chances.

San Francisco Opera, the country’s second oldest and second largest company, is in its second season under an intellectually curious and theatrically invigorating general director, Pamela Rosenberg. But it is also in serious debt -- $7.6 million last season and $9.2 million predicted this season. While Rosenberg has expressed determination to stay her courageous course, she has been forced to make compromises, substituting Achim Freyer’s celebrated production of Weber’s “Der Freischutz” and a Parisian production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Golden Cockerel” with run-of-the-mill repertory in productions it already owns.

To her credit, Rosenberg has not backed down on some of her most cherished projects, which will include the first company performances of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” and Busoni’s much-too-rare “Doktor Faust.” Committed to American opera, she is opening her season with Virgil Thomson’s “The Mother of Us All.”

Lyric Opera, also facing a serious budget crunch, has been more drastic in its artistic compromises. The company, which will open next season with a new production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” by Peter Hall (L.A. Opera’s Mozart specialist in its early years), has replaced its proposed provocative repertory -- Italo Montemezzi’s “L’Amore Dei Tre Re” and Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini” -- with Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” and Gounod’s potboiling “Faust.”

Texas fares no better. Dallas Opera has canceled the American premiere of “The Silver Tassie” by feisty young Brit Mark Anthony Turnage; the newly fearful Houston Grand Opera has backed off from dealing with the issue of capital punishment, replacing Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” next season with “The Merry Widow.” Size-wise, Los Angeles Opera’s 67 performances of eight operas are still behind San Francisco’s 76 performances of nine operas or the Lyric’s 83 performances of eight operas. But as other companies are cutting back, Angelenos are being offered 20% more performances next season.

And that is just the start. Dismissing its current deficit of $1.2 million as not worrisome -- $1 million of that is uncollected donations from philanthropist Alberto Vilar, which the company hopes to make up with special fund-raising -- Edgar Baitzel, L.A. Opera’s artistic director, said recently that the company’s goal is to reach 100 performances a season. In the meantime, San Francisco Opera announced last week that it would cope with the current financial situation by cutting back to 65 performances a season by 2005.

Nor does L.A. Opera appear nearly as worried about challenging audiences or opera traditions as Chicago and Houston have been lately. In a discipline in which women are still not given equal opportunity, for instance, the company boldly allotted half of next season’s six new productions to female directors, and the company’s glamorous new opera, “Nicholas and Alexandra,” was commissioned from a female composer, Deborah Drattell.

Championing voices

Domingo will lay his uncompromising cards on the table by opening next fall with a new production by Freyer of Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust.” After all, Freyer staged the controversial Bach B-minor Mass last season.

Some opera lovers hated the German painter and director’s abstractions and also questioned the appropriateness of an opera company, or anyone else, staging a Mass. While his imagery is always offbeat, Freyer has also created more conventional narrative productions of such visual exuberance that, like the “Freischutz” San Francisco canceled, they have become modern legends. So L.A. Opera, expecting something brilliant and at least vaguely recognizable on stage, is sticking to its Freyer guns in the belief that the “Damnation” could be an event, especially with a cast headed by Denyce Graves and Samuel Ramey and with principal conductor Kent Nagano leading one of his specialties.

Not only has Domingo made Los Angeles the only place in America you can see Freyer’s work, but he is also promising to provide an American base for Robert Wilson. Not long ago, The Times received regular letters from subscribers sick to death of the company’s constant programming of its 1991 production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.”

I don’t expect the same response next season, if Wilson’s new production is anything like the sublimely beautiful ones of Puccini’s opera that he created for Paris 10 years ago and last year in Amsterdam -- Wilson does not allow productions to travel but builds them anew for each company, which then owns them. This single production could expand the horizons of the traditional opera fan while also appealing to a new audience.

The female directors are fascinating choices. Anne Bogart, who head the New York avant-garde SITI Company, was responsible for the elaborately choreographed production of Drattell’s previous opera, “Lilith,” given by New York City Opera last season. Even such reviewers as Peter Davis at New York magazine, who considered the opera a “disaster,” found the ritualistic production at least to have its striking moments. And what a cast! Who won’t want to see Domingo as Rasputin, Rodney Gilfry as Czar Nicholas II, Nancy Gustafson as Alexandra and Mstislav Rostropovich in the pit? As a further plus, the score is already finished.

One also awaits with great curiosity what Swiss Brechtian stage actress and film star Marthe Keller will do with Donizetti’s study in madness, “Lucia di Lammermoor,” which also features the local debut of much-heralded Russian soprano Anna Netrebko. And it is an intriguing idea to put the experimental American choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs in charge of Gluck’s opera “Orfeo and Eurydice.” Childs was an unforgettable presence in a modern reform opera, the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson “Einstein on the Beach,” that, like the Gluck two centuries earlier, changed the direction of the art form.

Last-minute mind-set

Not everything has worked out as one might have hoped. A year ago, the company promised to begin a trilogy of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas in new productions by a major director and led by Nagano. But typical of much of the company’s last-minute scheduling, it waited too long to secure Nagano’s services for the new “Marriage of Figaro” next season, with the little-known Stefan Anton Reck taking his place. Still, Nagano will conduct “Butterfly” and the revival company’s 1993 production of Strauss’ “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” with David Hockney’s sets, which lacked one thing the first time around -- a major conductor.

Indeed, the only upcoming production that might be called business as usual is a revival of the company’s 1998 “Il Trovatore.” But at least it wasn’t a disaster, and given all the dreadful stagings of Verdi’s opera these days, even that’s special.

So how is the company doing all this? Baitzel says there is nothing that breaks the bank and points to the way he has negotiated co-productions with European companies to moderate costs. For instance, by signing on Warsaw Opera as a partner for the “Damnation,” Freyer can oversee the building of sets in the Polish company’s workshops, which are only an hour away from his Berlin base. The season, Baitzel says, reflects what Domingo wanted from the start for the company. But he needed time, especially in the wake of Sept. 11, and he also had to wait to expand until the Los Angeles Philharmonic moved out of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and into Walt Disney Concert Hall. Next fall, the moment of truth will arrive.

On stage, Domingo has heard a lot of bravos in his day. He hasn’t, however, been widely cheered as the head of an opera company. His other outfit, Washington Opera, is lackluster. For a while, chaos was his administrative hallmark here. The chaos hasn’t gone away and probably won’t as long as he is around. But Domingo’s claims that he can make Los Angeles an operatic capital are starting to sound like the real thing. Bravo!

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.