Oddball opera has a glorious moment in L.A., meatballs and all

If Los Angeles has a reputation for opera, it is as an outlier, a city freed from encrusted tradition and eager to invent. Long Beach Opera, the Industry and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have together created an enviable engine for remaking opera.

In the recently published “A New Philosophy of Art” by Industry founder Yuval Sharon, two chapters titled “Toward an Anti-Elite Opera” and “Breaking the Frame” offer an excellent introduction to opera L.A. style. But so, in a surprisingly different way, did three more mainstream L.A. opera companies that recently presented a trio of mid-19th century operas.

The operas — Russian, French and Italian — are out of the ordinary. The venues, bare-bones to grand. The geography, Westside to East.

In a community room at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in the Sawtelle district, Independent Opera on Friday gave the West Coast premiere of Alexander Dargomyzhsky‘s “The Stone Guest.” Left unfinished at the composer’s death in 1869, it was the most important opera of last weekend and delivered in far and away the least decorative manner.

Independent Opera was formed in 2012 by Ukrainian conductor, pianist and all-around powerhouse Galina Barskaya to perform operas not normally heard in L.A., no matter how modest the means. Friday night, the audience sat on four dozen folding chairs. Singers stood, themselves stone guests of sorts, at music stands. Barskaya accompanied at the piano. No matter, it was a revelation.

Dargomyzhsky is known, if known at all outside Russia, for this opera and for PDQ Bach’s 1970 unmissable parody album, “The Stoned Guest.” The real opera sets Pushkin’s play, which was written as a response to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” word for word. Barskaya told the audience that she can’t remember whether, growing up in Kyiv, she heard “The Stone Guest” or Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” first, so seminal is the work to the development of Russian opera.

Composed without arias or set pieces, Dargomyzhsky’s score illuminates Pushkin’s words and paves the way for the truly Russian opera, however grander, of Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The opera has a different take on Don Juan than does Mozart’s opera. Pushkin’s womanizing protagonist is more a romantic than a cad, and his servant, Leporello (a deep bass in the opera), darker and unfunny.

Dargomyzhsky died leaving only a piano score, which Rimsky-Korsakov wonderfully orchestrated, but hearing “The Stone Guest” sung without theatrical or orchestral trappings made a powerful case for the sheer musical power that can be invested in the Russian language and Pushkin’s text.

None of the score-bound young singers were Russian-speaking but they remained a talented and convincing cast, headed by TJ Simon (Don Juan), Michael Payne (Leporello), Shannon Moore (Donna Elvira) and Ariel Pisturino (Donna Anna).

Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Opera revived a lavish production of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet,” written two years earlier than “The Stone Guest.” Here were all the trappings of grand opera and none of the substance. Other than a couple of good tunes and a single popular aria, this vapid setting of Shakespeare’s play makes it one of the least notable works in the standard operatic repertory and the least worthy “Romeo and Juliet” adaptation I know, Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” included.

Even so, and with the help of an Ian Judge production, L.A. Opera got away with using Gounod to feature sensation-making young singers: no less than Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón in 2005, Vittorio Grigolo with Nino Machaidze six years later.

I had figured by now the Lego-like set would have long been recycled, and that was that. But leave it to L.A. Opera. It’s gotten away with it again — this time with the company debuts of a handsome, exhilarating pair of lovers, tenor Duke Kim and Amina Edris.

Taking over the original production, choreographer Kitty McNamee, in her first attempt at opera direction, brought a breath of fresh air by moving everyone onstage, including the chorus, with grace and flare. Despite the operatic odds in this work, the lovers provided consuming rapture. The fight scenes dazzled.

Best of all, the company had a conductor of remarkable eloquence who understood movement in all its musical aspects. Domingo Hindoyan, the Venezuelan chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, is a rising star. His Liverpool recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, released in the spring, has a glow and grandeur that allows it to stand out in a very crowded field. Hindoyan’s four performances with L.A. Opera run through Nov. 17 and are his only ones in the U.S. this season — a coup for the company. (Lina Gonzalez-Granados takes over the final two performances.) Does this signal that he is a candidate to succeed Music Director James Conlon, who steps down in 2026?

Not all Parisians were taken in by Gounod’s opera, hit though it was at the Théâtre Lyrique. A parody, “Rhum et Eau en Juillet” (‘Rum and Water in July”), was summarily staged at a competing Paris theater. It would be nice to know what that was like.

Continuing eastward to the Garibaldina Society in Highland Park on Sunday afternoon, I caught Pacific Opera Project’s latest goofy offering, Antonio Cagnoni’s “Don Bucefalo.”

Here was a parody opera for real. This obscure and hilariously outrageous takeoff on the genre of Italian opera buffa, written in 1846, turned out to be the hit of the weekend. As the director, designer and POP founder Josh Shaw reminded the audience, the final performances this weekend probably were the only chance to see this opera.

“Don Bucefalo” is obscure for a reason. It is full of in-jokes of the era, but with sly and not-so-sly gusto along with a gifted cast, Shaw turned this into riotous supper-club opera. POP seemed to start as a goof in 2011 — a peripatetic company making silly opera in corny, campy productions in unpredictable places such as the Highland Park Ebell Club, the Forest Lawn cemetery and Occidental College. It has grown to have a significant following. POP has given important premieres, such as the first professional Los Angeles staging of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” which was written in L.A. Last summer, Dvorak’s “Rusalka” was a delight staged at Descanso Gardens.

But POP may never have been goofier than with “Don Bucefalo,” performed in the Italian historic society founded in 1877. The stage was set up in a large room with tables covered by red-checkered tablecloths. Pasta with meatballs was available, as was Italian wine.

The set is nutty. The costumes are nutty. The opera, which revolves around an opera composer trying to put on a concert, is beyond nutty. The semi-talented Don Bucefalo, and other suitors including a semi-talented tenor, attempt to make love to a newly widowed, young, semi-talented soprano. Chaos, musical as well as romantic, ensues. There are Rossini jokes and Mozart jokes. Composer jokes included an arresting scene of this Don writing an aria worthy of PDQ Bach.

The biggest joke of all is on us. The music is actually quite good. The singers are too. As is the small chamber orchestra and the conductor, Kyle Naig. As Bucefalo, baritone Armando Contreras winningly overplayed the virtuoso farce, which was neither too lowbrow nor too highbrow. This will go down as one of the performances of the year.

He was surrounded by able singer-comedians, among them Véronique Filloux, Eric Botto, Dominic Salvati, Joel Balzun, Erin Alford and Mariah Rae, all of whom excellently mastered roles they likely will never have an opportunity to sing again. But in doing so, they have admirably lived up to Sharon’s anti-elite L.A. opera ideal of big-time breaking the frame.