• U.S.

TO LOVE AND DIE IN L.A.

4 minute read
Michael Walsh

SPECTATORS IN DOWNTOWN LOS Angeles are riveted by the drama: a jealous, estranged husband, driven to a murderous rage by the thought of his wife’s infidelity, slashes to death the man he supposes to be her lover. When the carnage is over, both wife and lover lie dead and the jealous husband is taken into custody by the L.A.P.D. To further complicate matters, the husband is black, the lover and the wife both white …

No, it isn’t the O.J. Simpson trial taking place at the L.A. County courthouse. It is the Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s sensational new production of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, currently on view at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion a couple of blocks away. In a season distinguished by compelling, innovative stagings of Strauss’s Elektra and Handel’s Xerxes, the new Pelleas offers yet more proof that for consistent excellence the still fledgling company is already the equal of its older and more established American rivals.

Debussy’s opera, based on the play by Belgian symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck, is set in the mythical kingdom of Allemonde, but director Peter Sellars has updated the locale to modern Malibu, California. The production was hailed when first seen in June 1993 at the Netherlands Opera; now, 20 months later in Los Angeles, the thematic overtones already present are eerily redoubled. Call it zeitgeist synergy.

Sellars, 37, is the former wunderkind director who brought composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman together for Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). He is known for his unconventional settings of operas and plays: he set Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, and only last year he moved The Merchant of Venice to Venice, California, just down the beach from Malibu. Always a skillful director of actors and stage movement, Sellars has often seemed capricious in his grand recontextualizations. But in this case, he has created a modern setting that is ingeniously apt and vivid.

Beloved of musicians, Pelleas has long been a challenge for audiences. There are no conventional arias or ensembles, and the tenebrous music never fully breaks into song. Like Maeterlinck’s poetry, the music is allusive rather than specific. Accordingly, most Pelleas productions take place in twilight or the dark; Sellars and set designer George Typsin have chosen to let the sun shine in. Instead of a vaguely medieval setting, the scene is a huge beach house constantly irradiated by the sunlight that glints off the ocean’s waves. The gloom is gone, but the doom remains. To underscore the sickness of King Arkel’s family, hospital beds have been placed in nearly every room.

The key to Sellars’ interpretation is Arkel (bass Kenneth Cox), who is prominent here as in few other stagings. Arkel represents an ancien ragime that refuses to cede power, quashing the aspirations of the younger generation, represented by the angry, violent Golaud (bass-baritone Willard White), his younger half brother Pelleas (baritone Francois Le Roux) and Melisande (mezzo Monica Groop), the mysterious girl Pelleas meets in the forest and brings home as his bride. The Simpson connection was coincidental, but the color-blind casting of White, who is black, creates an unintentional, tabloidy frisson.

Musically, the performance is on a level equal to the rest of the production. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, leading his Los Angeles Philharmonic, brings Boulezian clarity to the score, casting off the cobwebs and illuminating its darkest corners. Cox makes a noble Arkel, while Groop is both angelic and earthy as Melisande, and White achieves tragic status as Golaud. Only Le Roux’s bland, dispassionate Pelleas fails to measure up.

Altogether, this is a triumph for the Music Center Opera. Under founder and general director Peter Hemmings and artistic adviser Placido Domingo, the company heads into its 10th anniversary next season with attendance running near capacity and a budget of $16 million. Programming has been a mix of staples, often in provocative stagings (the David Hockney-Jonathan Miller Tristan in 1987), relatively unfamiliar or difficult works (Berg’s Wozzeck, Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel) and even a world premiere (Aulis Sallinen’s Kullervo).

Next season brings a new Flying Dutchman, directed by the dazzling Julie Taymor in her American opera debut. Hemmings foresees an eventual expansion of the Music Center Opera’s schedule to nearly 100 performances a year, which would make it the busiest company in the U.S. after the Metropolitan Opera. The worrisome-to snobbish Easterners-advance of civilization in Los Angeles continues.

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