3 wins for LA Opera, Pacific Opera Project, Independent Opera

If Los Angeles has a status for opera, it’s as an exception, a metropolis free of encrusted custom and wanting to invent. Long Beach Opera, Industry and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have collectively created an enviable engine for remaking opera.

In the lately revealed ebook “A New Philosophy of Art” by business founder Yuval Sharon, two chapters titled “Toward an Anti-Elite Opera” and “Breaking the Frame” provide a superb introduction to the Los Angeles opera type. But so, in a strikingly totally different means, did three different mainstream Los Angeles opera corporations that lately introduced a trio of mid-Nineteenth-century operas.

The works – Russian, French and Italian – are out of the odd. The locations, from the sparse to the grandiose. Geography, from west to east.

On Friday, in a neighborhood room at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church within the Sawtelle neighborhood, Independent Opera introduced the West Coast premiere of Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s “The Stone Guest.” Left unfinished when the composer died in 1869, it was final weekend’s main work and much much less decoratively introduced.

Independent Opera was based in 2012 by Ukrainian conductor, pianist and powerhouse Galina Barskaya to carry out works not usually heard in Los Angeles, irrespective of how modest the means. Friday night time the viewers was seated on 4 dozen folding chairs. The singers stood, themselves like stone visitors, on the lecterns. Barskaya accompanied on the piano. No matter, it was a revelation.

Dargomyzhsky is understood, if recognized in any respect exterior Russia, for this work and for the unmissable 1970 PDQ Bach parody album, “The Stoned Guest.” The actual opera units Pushkin’s opera, written phrase for phrase as a response to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. Barskaya instructed the viewers that she can’t keep in mind whether or not, rising up in Kiev, she heard Mozart’s “The Stone Guest” or “Don Giovanni” first, so essential is the work to the event of Russian opera.

Composed with out arias or scenes, Dargomyzhsky’s rating illuminates Pushkin’s phrases and paves the best way for the actually Russian, if grandiose, opera of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The opera takes a distinct strategy to Don Giovanni than Mozart’s opera. Pushkin’s womanizing protagonist is extra of a romantic than a scoundrel, and his servant, Leporello (a deep bass within the opera), darker and unfunny.

Dargomyzhsky died leaving solely a piano rating, which Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrated fantastically, however listening to “The Stone Guest” sung with out theatrical or orchestral trappings powerfully demonstrated the sheer musical energy that may be invested within the Russian language and the textual content by Pushkin.

None of the full-scoring younger singers have been Russian-speaking, however the forged remained convincing and gifted, led by TJ Simon (Don Juan), Michael Payne (Leporello), Shannon Moore (Donna Elvira) and Ariel Pisturino (Donna Anna).

On Saturday night time on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Opera revived a luxurious manufacturing of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet,” written two years earlier than “The Stone Guest.” Here have been all the trimmings of the good work and not one of the substance. Aside from a few good numbers and a single standard aria, this insipid setting of Shakespeare’s play makes it one of many least notable works in the usual opera repertoire and the least worthy adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” that I do know of, “Romeo +” by Baz Luhrmann. Juliet” included.

Nonetheless, and with the assistance of an Ian Judge manufacturing, LA Opera managed to get away with utilizing Gounod to current spectacular younger singers: none apart from Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón in 2005, Vittorio Grigolo with Nino Machaidze six years later.

By now I had assumed that the Lego-style set would have been recycled way back, and that was it. But go away it to the LA Opera. He’s carried out it once more, this time making his debut within the firm of a good looking and hilarious pair of lovers, the tenor Duke Kim and Amina Edris.

Taking over the unique manufacturing, choreographer Kitty McNamee, in her first try at opera route, introduced a breath of contemporary air by making everybody on stage, together with the choir, transfer with grace and elan. Despite operatic odds on this work, the lovers offered a consuming ecstasy. The struggle scenes dazzled.

Above all, the corporate had a conductor of exceptional eloquence who understood the motion in all its musical elements. Domingo Hindoyan, the Venezuelan principal conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, is a rising star. His Liverpool recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, launched within the spring, has a splendor and grandeur that permits it to face out in a crowded area. Hindoyan’s 4 performances with LA Opera run by means of Nov. 17 and are his solely within the United States this season — a coup for the corporate. (Lina Gonzalez-Granados will deal with the ultimate two performances.) Does this sign that he’s a candidate to succeed musical director James Conlon, who will step down in 2026?

Not all Parisians have been received over by Gounod’s work, nonetheless spectacular it was on the Théâtre Lyrique. A parody, “Rhum et Eau en Juillet” (“Rum and Water in July”), was summarily staged at a competing Paris theater. It can be good to know what it was like.

On Sunday afternoon, persevering with east towards the Garibaldina Society in Highland Park, I caught the Pacific Opera Project’s newest foolish providing, Antonio Cagnoni’s “Don Bucefalo.”

Here is a parody work for actual. This darkish and hilarious take-off of the Italian opera buffa style, written in 1846, proved to be the hit of the weekend. As director, designer and POP founder Josh Shaw reminded audiences, this weekend’s remaining performances have been seemingly the one alternative to see this work.

“Don Bucefalo” is darkish for a motive. It’s stuffed with interval jokes, however with sly and not-so-sly style together with a gifted forged, Shaw has turned it right into a riotous supper-club opera. POP appeared to have began as a joke in 2011: a peripatetic firm producing foolish works in corny, campy productions in unpredictable places just like the Highland Park Ebell Club, Forest Lawn Cemetery, and Occidental College. It has grown to have a big following. POP has introduced main premieres, resembling the primary skilled Los Angeles staging of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” written in Los Angeles Last summer time, Dvorak’s “Rusalka” was a delight staged at Descanso Gardens.

But POP was by no means as foolish as with “Don Bucefalo,” carried out within the historic Italian society based in 1877. The stage was set in a big room with tables coated in red-checkered tablecloths. Pasta with meatballs was obtainable, as was Italian wine.

The set is loopy. The costumes are loopy. The opera, which revolves round an opera composer making an attempt to arrange a live performance, is past loopy. The semi-talented Don Bucefalo, and different suitors, together with a semi-talented tenor, try to make like to a newly widowed, younger, semi-talented soprano. Chaos, musical and romantic, ensues. There are traces by Rossini and contours by Mozart. The composer’s traces included a stunning scene of this Don writing an aria worthy of PDQ Bach.

The largest joke of all is on us. The music is definitely fairly good. Singers are too. As effectively because the small chamber orchestra and the conductor, Kyle Naig. In the position of Bucephalus, baritone Armando Contreras efficiently exaggerated the virtuoso farce, which was neither too low nor too mental. This will probably be remembered as one of many performances of the 12 months.

He was surrounded by achieved singer-comedians, together with Véronique Filloux, Eric Botto, Dominic Salvati, Joel Balzun, Erin Alford and Mariah Rae, all of whom excellently mastered roles they’ll in all probability by no means have the chance to sing once more. But in doing so, they admirably lived as much as Sharon’s Los Angeles-based anti-elite ideally suited of breaking the mildew in an enormous means.