Accidentally Puccini

When Los Angeles Opera opens its final offering of the season, Puccini’s seldom-heard “La Rondine,” tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the offstage creative team will represent a curious coincidence. The director of the production, Marta Domingo, is married to the company’s general director, Placido Domingo. And giving the downbeat in the pit will be conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, whose husband just happens to be Peter Gelb, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Don’t ask her about him, though.

During a recent pre-rehearsal interview in Placido Domingo’s spacious office, the statuesque (6-foot) Wilson, 41, declined to talk about her husband or about how her five-year marriage might affect her career. She said she prefers to keep her professional and personal lives separate.

And anyway, it’s the experience she acquired playing in orchestras, she believes, that has given her an edge. As she explained, she never set out to be an opera conductor or, for that matter, even a conductor.

A native of Winnipeg, Canada, Wilson majored in flute at New York’s Juilliard School. But eight months before graduating with a master’s degree, she made “an overnight decision” to try for a conducting career.

“It was taking a huge step backward,” she said. “Here I had mastered my instrument and I was doing something I was completely unfamiliar with.”

Well, not completely. Wilson grew up in a musical family. Her grandfather was a singer. Her grandmother was a pianist. Her father was the conductor of the Winnipeg Youth Orchestra.

“At home, I had already experienced a lot of things that would lead eventually to becoming a conductor,” she said, “not only in the sense of hearing music and being exposed to scores and all the instruments I wanted to play, but also answering the phone and going on tours and helping out my father administratively.”

In addition, while still a student, Wilson had prepared for the transition to a new career by working as an assistant to veteran conductor Claudio Abbado at the summer Salzburg Festival in Austria and as a conducting fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. And, immediately after graduating, she was hired as associate conductor of the Dallas Symphony, a post she held for four years before turning freelance. Since then, she has divided her time about evenly between opera and orchestral repertory.

“When I went to Dallas, I had never conducted an opera,” she said. “Until then, my life was symphonic. I have no voice. I’m a terrible singer, and I was a symphonic snob.”

That changed after she left Texas. The first opera she conducted was Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” in Verona, Italy, in 1999. “I was put in the lion’s den in Italian repertoire with an Italian orchestra, and I had a fantastic experience. And it had a snowball effect. I’ve been doing so much opera ever since.”

In fact, Wilson has acquired a reputation as something of a Puccini specialist. In the intervening years, she has led “Madame Butterfly” at the Leipzig Opera in Germany; “Tosca” in Verona and Nice, France; “La Boheme” and “Butterfly” at the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, Russia; and “Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Turandot” at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago, Italy, where the composer lived, worked and is buried.

“La Rondine,” however, will mark not only her L.A. Opera debut but her first time leading Puccini’s wistful take on Viennese operetta. It’s sometimes dubbed the Italian “Rosenkavalier.”

“To do a debut, I would prefer to do something I’ve done before,” she said. “However, with the Puccini repertory, it feels like home because I have done most of his operas. The only other one I haven’t done is ‘Trittico.’ ”

Even so, by comparison with “Tosca,” “Butterfly,” and “Boheme,” all of which were composed earlier, “La Rondine,” first performed in 1917, is a kind of stepchild.

“I think we are ready for it now,” said Wilson. “We’re realizing this is a jewel, and it’s a challenge to do theatrically, to make it not kitsch, which is very dangerous.”

She likes director Domingo’s production, which draws on archival material as well as the three versions Puccini wrote (including two endings and an excised aria for the tenor in Act 1, among other variations).

Domingo’s concept “brings a more dramatic element to the opera,” the conductor said. “There’s something tragic about it.

“Puccini is not done well -- a lot -- because it’s easy to make it big and grand and call it a day, and audiences love it,” she added. “But ultimately, did it have the finesse, the colors that are so rich? You can’t throw it away. The trick is finding the balance of maintaining the energy all throughout without it becoming too elastic. Otherwise it falls apart.”

Although she is happy to be making a reputation in Puccini, she said, she’d also like to conduct Russian operas.

“I speak Russian. I have Russian blood. I’m dying to get my hands on my first ‘Onegin’ and ‘Pique Dame’ and ‘Boris.’ Just really all of them. It’s a good area for me to go into because there are very few Russian-speaking conductors other than the group of Russians that are out there.”

Although she will head to St. Petersburg for the “White Nights Festival” the day after the last L.A. “Rondine,” she won’t get her wish this time. She’s slated to conduct Verdi’s “La Traviata” there.

“The jet lag is going to be lovely,” she said jokingly, but then offered what sounded like a career credo: “Yes, you want to be home sometimes, and of course, with the family, it’s difficult. However, that said, this is my life. I’ve always been like this, traveling. I never feel lonely. I feel very at home with my books and music. That, for me, is comfort.”

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chris.pasles@latimes.com

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‘La Rondine’

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

When: 7:30 p.m. today and Thursday; 2 p.m. June 15; 7:30 p.m. June 19; 2 p.m. June 22; 7:30 p.m. June 25 and 28

Price: $20 to $238

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or

www.laopera.com