Cottoning to Los Angeles

AFTER just a few months on the job, Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon has already had a salutary effect on the company’s orchestra.

“We’ve all played with a lot of conductors,” says concertmaster Stuart Canin, “but James’ rehearsal technique is way beyond everyone else’s. He has a way of doing things so that we get to hear the other sections and connect with them, and that’s what makes a great ensemble.”

Others have been impressed as well. Times music critic Mark Swed wrote that Conlon’s conducting of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” early this season made the score “feel impressively unrelenting” and that his “tight” leadership of Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the opening gala provided “a necessary anchor for a loose production.”

Conlon honed his technique working in Europe over two decades, leading the Paris Opera, the Cologne (Germany) Opera and the Rotterdam (Netherlands) Philharmonic. The affable and still-boyish Manhattan-born conductor, who will turn 56 in March, returned to New York in 2004 after accepting the job of music director at the summertime Ravinia Festival in Illinois. But back then, Los Angeles wasn’t even on his map.

“I’m an East Coaster,” he said recently during one of a series of interviews in his small office at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “California has basically played almost no role in my life.”

All the same, L.A. Opera general director Placido Domingo kept urging him to come here after Kent Nagano left the company last year to become music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany, and the Montreal Symphony. And, said Conlon, “The more I thought about it, the more I picked up his infectious enthusiasm about a company that is growing so fast.”

Family matters had also been on his mind. His daughter, Luisa, named after the heroine of Verdi’s opera “Luisa Miller,” was in high school, and he wanted her to go to college in the U.S. So Conlon, his wife, soprano Jennifer Ringo, 17-year-old Luisa and another daughter, Emma, 10, decided to move to the West Coast. Conlon is in temporary digs until Luisa graduates this year. Then the whole family will relocate.

As it turns out, Domingo’s association with Conlon goes back a long way.

“We’ve known each other since he was practically in his teens and I was just 25 years old,” the famous tenor said by phone from Barcelona, Spain.

“We met when he was a student at Juilliard and I was in New York City Opera making my debut with Ginastera’s ‘Don Rodrigo.’ I’d always see this young boy coming to these performances. Next time we met it was a few year later, when he came to the Met. He’s conducting me in ‘Boheme’! He’s a brilliant musician. We’re lucky to have him. Being an American is even better.”

Wagner has an ally

RIGHT now, it’s a bit early in Conlon’s tenure for him to be willing to go beyond generalities, but the conductor does have a vision of the future. He wants to make Los Angeles a center for Wagner (an L.A. Opera “Ring” has been scheduled since he came aboard) as well as the launching pad for his “Recovered Voices” project -- reviving music suppressed during the Third Reich. He’s already shown himself a passionate advocate for such composers as Viktor Ullmann, Alexander Zemlinsky, Pavel Haas and Hans Krasa in concerts in Europe and in guest conducting stints in the U.S. Among his extensive recordings are nine Zemlinsky works.

“No major opera company has produced any opera at all from this period,” he said. “That’s amazing. We’re going to be the ones to do it. And we’re not going to be able to do it in two or three years. This whole issue will outlive me.”

He also wants to give performances that are as life-changing as the one he heard as an 11-year-old seeing his first opera.

“It was the moment I became completely conscious of classical music and how much I love it,” he said. “It transformed my life to what it is today. Every time I go out on that podium, I think to myself, ‘There are people out there -- they could be 11 years old, they could be 5, they could be 80 -- but you have the chance to change somebody’s life for the better. They deserve 100% out of me, and they deserve 100% out of everybody on that stage, everybody in the orchestra.’ That’s the credo.”

He’s particularly gratified that L.A. Opera is a young and growing company.

“Sometimes you can be innovative there in a way that’s harder elsewhere,” he said. “So I’m now very happy.

“There is no such thing in life as no obstacles, no problems,” he added. “And there is certainly no such thing as an opera company with no problems. We have enormous challenges in front of us. We have enormous things to be accomplished.”

Could he be more specific?

“Basically, I’ve been here two months,” he said with a smile.

What about the state of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, slated for a makeover within the next few years?

“Refurbishing the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is not just an institutional issue, that’s a big-city issue,” he said. “Remember that this was a multipurpose hall, and like most multipurpose halls, it doesn’t serve any of those purposes to their maximum.

“If somebody had, I don’t know, $5 billion, there’s no question the thing to do is build a new opera house. I don’t know if anyone has the appetite for that right now. Not having $5 billion, I think the most likely thing that’s going to happen is the city, whoever that consortium of people will have to be, needs really to make this as good as it can be.”

Conlon insisted he wasn’t being evasive. It’s just that he’s not the one who makes the decisions. Domingo does, although he consults with Conlon and chief operating officer Edgar Baitzel. Conlon likes it that way.

“You have two people with power, it doesn’t work,” he said. “Placido is the boss. Every final decision’s Placido’s. I can -- and do -- advise on all issues. Placido is gracious and he listens to everything, and then he can decide himself.”

An Adams chronicle

ALTHOUGH it may be a while before Conlon’s local imprint becomes clearer, he’s happy to talk about his enthusiasms.

Contemporary opera is one, although he isn’t sure Los Angeles will see John Adams’ controversial “The Death of Klinghoffer” -- about the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists -- any time soon. The company co-commissioned the work in 1991 but has refused to mount it.

“First of all, I love John Adams,” he said. “Would I love to conduct that piece? Yes. Should we do it? Could we do it? We should do it. Will we do it? Don’t know. Just remember that we’re basically at about 10 productions a year. So everything is a process of elimination.”

Russian opera?

“My passion. If you woke me up in the middle of the night and said, ‘What do you miss the most?’ I’d say ‘Boris Godunov.’ ‘Khovanshchina’? I’ve had three or four runs of it. I would do it in a second. That’s a big challenge for us. First of all, you need a massive chorus. We have to address that. And it takes a lot of time in preparation for people not used to singing in Russian.”

He also expressed affection for Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and “Eugene Onegin,” Massenet’s “Don Quichotte,” Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” (“One of the singular masterpieces. It’s up there with ‘Boris,’ with ‘Wozzeck,’ with ‘Don Giovanni,’ with ‘Parsifal’ and ‘Tristan’ ”) and especially middle-period Verdi, as witness his daughter’s name.

“Luisa is going to be 18 in a few weeks,” he said. “I keep thinking to myself, ‘Where has the time gone? Why haven’t I conducted “Luisa Miller” in 18 years?’ That’s how long it’s been since I’ve conducted it.

“There are lots of works like that that we can do. Can we do them? I cannot tell you that there are plans. I can only tell you that this is a dream of mine.”

Still, he ventures one possible solution: perform operas in concert instead of staging them. He’s done that with success in Cologne, at the Cincinnati May Festival and elsewhere.

“There are operas that work brilliantly in the concert hall,” he said. “In essence, our first ‘Recovered Voices’ project is going to be a concert performance.”

“Recovered Voices” kicks off March 7 during the middle of the company run of Wagner’s “Tannhauser,” which Conlon is also conducting. The first program will include excerpts from operas by Ullmann, Franz Schreker, Walter Braunfels, Erwin Schulhoff and Erich Korngold, along with a complete performance of Zemlinsky’s “A Florentine Tragedy.” The concert will be repeated March 10.

But mention of the project hits a nerve in Conlon. Some people, he said, have questioned how he can conduct Wagner -- indeed, aim to make Los Angeles a center for Wagner -- at the same time he promotes music that the Nazis suppressed.

“Do I see a problem performing Wagner along with this project? I see none,” he said. “In fact, I like it that they’re going to be side by side. I like that historical context, because that’s what the Nazis wanted to prevent. They wanted to prevent all those composers from finding their eventual place in history.”

As for Wagner, he said, “You can say you hate him, you can say you don’t like his music, you can say he was an anti-Semite. But you can’t say that about the music. What was his theme? His theme was the same in every opera -- redemptive love.”

That’s certainly true of “Tannhauser,” running at the Pavilion through March 18. The opera deals with the conflict between earthly passion and spiritual aspiration.

“All human beings deal with this dichotomy,” Conlon said. “We’re all spiritual beings. We’re all physical beings. Some philosophies and religions accept it all and it’s all integrated. Our civilization has always had a dynamic of conflict on these issues.

“Tannhauser is Wagner, of course. He’s seen what others of us haven’t seen and he’s going to sing it. He is going to show us how the illuminated artist who has the courage to confront the spiritual-erotic dichotomy has the ability to come and speak about it but will have to suffer for doing that. So, boy, that’s packed with subject matter, don’t you think?

“For me, Wagner will never go away. He’s one of the great geniuses not just of the 19th century but one of the greatest creative geniuses we know of in Western civilization. He impacted everybody.”

chris.pasles@latimes.com

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‘Tannhauser’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday, March 8 and 15; 2 p.m. March 11 and 18

Price: $30 to $220

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

Also

What: ‘Recovered Voices’

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

When: 7:30 p.m. March 7 and 10

Price: $15 to $125