Flashes of Mozartean magic

Premiered in 1781, days before Mozart turned 25, “Idomeneo” needed another two centuries and the general deification of its composer to get respect. But it’s got it now. Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo have sung the title role. James Levine and Simon Rattle have conducted the score. Last year, Peter Sellars directed the opera with revelatory relevancy at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, a gripping production that shows this ancient Greek drama as something practically ripped out of modern-day Iraq.

And Wednesday Los Angeles Opera demonstrated enough confidence in this old-fashioned opera seria to open its 19th season with it. Indeed, “Idomeneo” was chosen as the first opera in which Domingo, the company’s general manager, and Kent Nagano, its music director, would work together locally. A starry cast was assembled that was to have included Anna Netrebko and Angelika Kirchschlager (although not for the first two performances). The company also had promised a production from the Salzburg Festival by the quirky, visually exciting husband-and-wife team Ursel and Karl-Ernst Herrmann.

Unfortunately, many of those plans unraveled between that announcement early in the year and opening night. The Salzburg production proved too expensive to refashion for the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage. Netrebko and Kirchschlager are the latest casualties, having dropped out, citing other obligations and exhaustion.

At least Domingo and Nagano have remained as a committed if curious pair in an otherwise unimaginative and occasionally risible production picked up from Flanders Opera in Belgium and created by the Scottish director David McVicar. The cast rarely rose above the ordinary. And many first-nighters, tuxedoed and gowned for a party afterward, may well have found “Idomeneo,” with its endless recitatives, conventionally formal arias and dances, along with its antique plot, a long slog.

At 63 and one of the most epic figures in the history of the lyric stage, Domingo is hardly anyone’s idea of the light-voiced, elegant Mozartean tenor anymore. In a recent recording of “Idomeneo,” the ethereal, exquisitely sensitive Ian Bostridge seems exactly right for the title role of Crete’s king who returns to his kingdom after fighting the Trojan War and finds he must sacrifice his son to appease the gods.

But Domingo has preserved his voice over the years through sheer heroic willpower, and Wednesday he rose to the stentorian stature of classical tragedy. His sound may lack its former bloom, but he still has the focus, he still sings in tune, and he still can find his way around Mozartean runs with considerable vocal athleticism.

Nagano gave him no break. Taking a swift, suave, graceful approach, the conductor seemed as though he was providing the ideal support for a young, lissome tenor, for a Bostridge. But this only served to make Domingo all the more musically compelling, so strong were his emotions that they seemed to operate on their own. To save himself during a storm, Idomeneo makes a pact with Neptune, agreeing to sacrifice the first person he meets upon reaching shore. That person is Idamante, his son, and Idomeneo tries to weasel out of the deal by acting as though none of this ever happened. By fitting into Nagano’s musical conception without really being part of it, Domingo brilliantly revealed the essential nature of that haunted inner conflict.

Nothing else, though, came close to living up to the fascinating Domingo/Nagano chemistry. With the production in the hands of director Vera Lucia Calabria, the staging contains a surfeit of crazed silent movie gestures. The monotonous set by Michael Vale, with its rear wall that opens to reveal Greek masks, was reminiscent of a ‘60s paperback cover of a Joseph Campbell book on mythology. The costumes put the Cretans in red gowns and robes, and the Trojan prisoners in blue.

Kate Aldrich was the dutiful, well-sung Idamante; Adriana Damato, the slightly overbearing Ilia, the Trojan princess who falls in love with Idamante. The Chilean soprano Veronica Villarroel, often impressive in the past, was alarming as Elettra, who tries to steal Idamante from Ilia. This is the one wild role in the opera, and Villarroel played it to the absurd hilt, flailing about the stage.

As Idomeneo’s confidant, Corey Evan Rotz was a reliable Arbace.

There are dances at the end, but choreographer Arthur Pita put a troupe of irrelevant dancers to work throughout the evening, doing nothing to undo the production’s silliness factor. The chorus could use another rehearsal or two.

Nagano, however, had the orchestra playing very beautifully, so beautifully that, despite other disappointments, a listener was always aware of the sheer eloquence that can be plumbed from this early score.

*

‘Idomeneo’

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 7:30 p.m. today, Tuesday, next Friday and Sept. 23; 2 p.m. Sunday and Sept. 26

Ends: Sept. 26

Price: $25 to $190

Contact: (213) 365-3500, (213) 972-8001