Slower and louder but just as opulent

“Ridi, Pagliaccio.” Laugh, clown, laugh at the pain that poisons your heart.

When Roberto Alagna, as Canio, sang this famous line in a murderous rage Sunday afternoon to bring down the curtain on the first act of Los Angeles Opera’s “Pagliacci,” he had two choices. He could see if any cheap jokes were still lying around the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. There had been more than enough the night before in Garry Marshall’s adaptation of Offenbach’s “The Grand Duchess,” which opened this 20th anniversary season. Or he could go ahead and do what the composer, Leoncavallo, required: Kill his wife.

He stuck to the script and killed Nedda. He killed, onstage, his wife in real life, Angela Gheorghiu. At the curtain call, she gave him a big kiss.

This cuckolded clown, sitting alone in his dressing room applying white-face over his tears, is one of opera’s searing images. This is a tight tragic tale of love, lust and revenge within a touring commedia dell’arte company, usually told in a little more than an hour. These itinerant players, confused about the distinctions between comedy and tragedy and between stage and life, are lost to their emotions. We focus on them and watch them unravel. Their audience doesn’t interest them -- or us.

Franco Zeffirelli’s production, first given by L.A. Opera in 1996 and now re-created by Marco Gandini, takes a somewhat different tack. The crowd scenes are meant to interest us very much. They’re grand. A teeming tenement somewhere in Italy contains a city’s worth of what look like 1970s types. There is room for cars and motor scooters. Acrobats parade. Some in the crowd appear to have mistaken the circus for the disco.

It’s a dazzling, riotous spectacle, meant to be a show all by itself. Go ahead, applaud the sets, even if it is a little peculiar that the Music Center, with “Dead End” at the Ahmanson, now has two ultra-lavish productions glamorizing tenement settings.

It takes strong performers to make an impression on such a stage, stronger than those L.A. Opera has assembled. But that hardly hinders the conductor, Nicola Luisotti. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Sunday’s performance was the physically imposing playing he got from the orchestra. He is of the school of conductors who believe the foundation of the orchestra is the bass instruments, and he coaxes from them deep, rich, expressive playing. He likes slow. Very, very slow. And he likes loud.

The orchestra sounded great, but what with these sets and this conductor, the less powerful singers, meaning everyone but Gheorghiu, didn’t stand much of a chance. So ponderously slow was the prologue, in which the misshapen clown Tonio, who longs for Nedda, introduces the opera, that Luisotti came as close to strangling a baritone as possible without touching him. The lightish-voiced victim here was Alberto Mastromarino.

Alagna is a lightish tenor who looks good, in a rakish European way. He has a natural lyric bent. He didn’t embarrass himself, but you constantly sensed how hard he was working to overcome natural limitations.

Gheorghiu does have the power -- along with an intimidating dramatic intensity. Vulnerability is not her strong suit. She demonstrated not so much fear of Canio as disdain. You had the feeling that, had she been paying a little more attention at the climax, she could have wrestled the knife from him with little problem.

She sang her little aria to the birds beautifully -- but heroically, not sensitively. Her duet with her lover Silvio, adequately sung by Mariusz Kwiecien, was ponderously slow, heavy, more labored than sexual.

When this production premiered, with Placido Domingo as a commanding Canio, some complained that a 70-minute opera did not give them their money’s worth. Well, ticket prices have gone up a lot since then, but attention spans have diminished, and Luisotti’s tempos add a good dozen minutes. With intermission, you’re at the theater for more than two hours. And there is a lot to look at. It’s enough.

*

‘Pagliacci’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135

N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday, Sept. 21 and 29; 2 p.m. Sept. 24 and Oct. 1

Price: $30 to $205

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.laopera.com