LA Opera goes Hollywood

Placido Domingo mines film talent for new season




It's been a long libretto and lashings of operas, high notes and low notes since superstar tenor Placido Domingo took over the Los Angeles Opera in 2001. But one accomplishment the risk-taking 67-year old aesthetic director points to with special pride is that "many of my dreams about victimisation the talent in Hollywood are coming true."

This season, Domingo is beginning with an operatic Hollywood two-step: Filmmakers William Friedkin and Woody Allen will direct the ternary one-act operas that make up Puccini's "Il Trittico," and David Cronenberg testament direct (and Domingo conduct) the U.S. premiere of Howard Shore's "The Fly," adapted from Cronenberg's 1986 film for which Shore supplied the score.

The artistic risks are that neither Allen nor Cronenberg, like Garry Marshall last season in Offenbach's "The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein," has of all time directed an opera. Friedkin, on the other handwriting, has directed here and abroad; his LA Opera productions include a Bartok/Puccini double bill in Domingo's first season and an "Ariadne auf Naxos" (Richard Strauss) in the 2004-05 season.

Cronenberg, whom Domingo introduced along with Shore at a late news conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, admits not having done whatever stage work since "playing Banquo in high school," but he talked enthusiastically about the challenge. The Canadian director described David Henry Hwang's libretto as "very cinematic: lots of back and forth kind of than monologues and arias."

Allen, wHO has directed only his own one-act plays, of late told the Village Voice, "I'll just do the best I can, and then get down out of town and let them tar and feather Friedkin." In both cases, it was Domingo who provided the impetus for initiating the projects and selecting the vehicles he thought would be suitable to the trey directors' personality and talents.

Used to making risky choices, Domingo believes that movie directors, even inexperienced ones, date things in different dimensions. Over the years, he has brought in Julie Taymor, Maximilian Schell, Bruce Beresford, Herbert Ross, John Schlesinger, Marthe Keller and Franco Zeffirelli to provide "new and different opera experiences."

Whoever is directing, a night at the opera is constantly a financial gamble.

The Opera's 2008-09 budget is estimated at $60 million, 50% more than than it was when Domingo took over, and it has to pay for 67 performances of 11 operas. So far in the new century, it's been relatively smooth cruising for the company, although like other playacting arts organizations, it took a funding hit later on Sept. 11. And even, single ticket prices are holding constant, ranging from $20 to $250.

Domingo is also putt his tender on the season by singing the role of Siegmund, one of Wagner's lustiest heroes, in "Die Walkure." The feat is being perceived as fairly remarkable -- so much so that fans from around the world are making plans to assist one of the seven-spot performances to hear Domingo seduce the character of Sieglinde, Siegmund's twin sister in the opera. Domingo's partner in crime will be Anja Kampe, one of the hottest young sopranos around.

The season's biggest artistic risk is likewise its one off-the-wall production, "The Fly," which discomfited critics in July when it premiered at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. There was admiration for it as a theater small-arm, thanks to Dante Ferretti's striking fifties set henpecked by deuce contraptions, like giant industrial washing machines, which create the story's half-human fiend, and Stephan Dupuis' special effects. Shore's music, however, received mixed reactions.

The real meat of the season starts in February with the first of the deuce installments ("Das Rheingold" in April testament be the other) in the company's first production of Wagner's four-opera larger-than-life, "The Ring of the Nibelungen." Directed by Achim Freyer and conducted by LA Opera's music director James Conlon, it testament be a back-breaking department of Labor of love life but one that is every opera company's proof of its bona fides.