‘Figaro’ is a fitting farewell for Nagano

I doubt that many who attend “The Marriage of Figaro” know exactly what is going on at all points in its screwball plot. Yet Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, when Los Angeles Opera brought back its perfectly likable 2004 production of Mozart’s opera, I noticed something unusual.

As the situation on stage got more confusing, heads in the audience began bobbing less. Many no longer bothered to try to catch every word on the titles high above the stage and follow the action at the same time.

The audience evidently sensed that the important action was interior, that it doesn’t mean a thing for the philandering Count to be given his comeuppance by a couple of clever servants. Something deeper takes place. Characters who didn’t trust learn they must. Social barriers cannot endure. “Figaro” is comedy, so everything works out fine. But happiness, always elusive, is not what Mozart asks for. Understanding is.

Saturday’s performance was wise and elusive because Mozart’s music is wise and elusive and because Kent Nagano conducted. This is a significant juncture in the history of Los Angeles Opera. “Figaro” is Nagano’s farewell to the company.

After the last performance of the production on April 15, he will decamp, staying not even long enough to take part in the company’s 20th-anniversary gala four days later. He has big fish to fry; he’ll become music director of both Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Montreal Symphony in the fall.

This “Figaro” reveals much about what Nagano has accomplished -- and failed to accomplish -- in his two seasons as L.A. Opera’s principal conductor and three as its music director. Before Nagano arrived, L.A. Opera’s orchestra was inadequate. No longer. It is now superb, and that was evident from the very start Saturday night.

The “Figaro” overture became Mozart taking wing, never touching ground. Not content for it to be as earthy, robust or funny as some conduct it, Nagano conjured up a Mozart just out of reach, indefinite, enchanted. Phrases didn’t seem to stop and start, ideas weren’t defined. Rather, Nagano reached for something higher than easy laughs or answers.

But this “Figaro” also highlights how, institutionally, Nagano failed to achieve some of his goals for the company. One was to be a cycle of the operas Mozart wrote with his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, all to be produced by a presumably provocative, high-profile director. The company never got that act together. Though slapdash, a lightweight “Don Giovanni” directed by Christophe Durrant succeeded by dint of Erwin Schrott’s exciting Don and by Nagano’s probing conducting.

The 2004 “Figaro,” directed by Ian Judge, was also another chaotic, last-minute enterprise, and this time Nagano didn’t even conduct, turning the new production over to Stefan Anton Reck. The third of the Mozart/Da Ponte cycle, “Cosi fan Tutte,” never materialized.

Still, the “Figaro,” set in Franco’s Spain, turned out remarkably well. It had in its favor two years ago a remarkably frisky cast, led by Schrott and Isabel Bayrakdarian as Figaro and Susanna. This time the cast was more mature.

Here the popular American soprano Barbara Bonney brought an emotional weight to the role of Susanna, and around her the performance revolved. She could be funny but not really fun. She knew too much for that. Her voice has lost some of its lightness, though not the shimmer. But the new thickness of tone means an extra helping of radiance.

Without much fuss, she became a sort of spiritual guide for the evening. There might have been tension between the soprano’s focus -- her every phrase was given diamond-like detail -- and Nagano’s more ambiguous approach. But in fact they complemented each other perfectly. He brought out the mystery in her; she kept him from being too mysterious.

Ildar Abdrazakov, an elegant young Russian baritone, was an unusually elegant Figaro. The Count and Countess were a formal pair. David Pittsinger repeated his understated but effective Count from 2004. Adrianne Pieczonka was a grand and moving Countess. Lucy Schaufer, a rapscallion Cherubino, was the exciting fly in the ointment.

But it was the pit that kept drawing my attention. Often the orchestra, though raised high, was not audible enough. Nagano may already have the sound of Munich’s smaller, more Mozart-suitable theater in mind. But the sophistication he brought to the evening could not be missed.

Two magical moments, both near the end, defined, for me, the interpretation. One was the wedding procession. One of Mozart’s liveliest, most hum-along-tuneful marches accompanies the conflicting emotions of all the main characters. Nagano kept it so ambiguously airy that it became an emotional mirror. At any moment you could hear in it joy, anger, regret, sadness.

Then there was the instant of forgiveness just before the final rejoicing at the end. Nagano here became deadly serious. Everything seemed to stop in a slow, solemn, Beethovenian moment of great wonder. Here you knew without a doubt that none of these characters would be the same.

And here we also knew that, thanks to Nagano, Los Angeles Opera has changed as well, very much for the better.

*

‘The Marriage of Figaro’

What: Los Angeles Opera

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 7, 12, 15; 2 p.m. Sunday and April 9

Price: $30 to $205

Contact: (213) 972-0777; www.laopera.com