Opera review: 'Tamerlano' at L.A. Opera

For all the work’s virtues, the main reason that Los Angeles Opera has mounted a production of Handel’s “Tamerlano” is that tenor Plácido Domingo recently added the role of Bajazet to his repertory.

Bajazet is not the title character, but he may be opera’s first truly heroic tenor. The role provides a wide range of emotion that Domingo exploited with compelling power at the opera's opening Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Domingo's voice may be too robust, lush and big to be ideal for works by baroque composers such as Handel. But the famed tenor was able to invest the part with great sympathy and appeal.

The plot hinges on Tamerlano’s love for Asteria, the daughter of defeated Turkish sultan Bajazet. Tamerlano means to marry her instead of his betrothed, Irene. Unknown to him, however, Asteria and Andronico, one of his allies in the war, are already in love. The feints and stratagems of working out this complicated love triangle inspired Handel’s rich score.     

The young soprano Sarah Coburn was an effective Asteria, singing her lines and negotiating the complicated embellishments with a precision and accuracy shared by her colleagues.

Music review: Thomas Hampson at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

American baritone Thomas Hampson is singing of a “dusky woman,” with a “woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet.” That woman is not the usual Romantic figure extolled in lieder recitals, and that’s Hampson’s point.

The woman is a slave, immortalized in a poem by Walt Whitman, in a song by the now utterly forgotten American composer, Henry T. Burleigh.

She, Burleigh and a host of other obscure American composers are part of America’s forgotten heritage. Hampson’s mission of late has been to revive it through his touring “Song of America Project,” created in collaboration with the Library of Congress.

Review: Yvonne Rainer at REDCAT

Making dances about dance is a familiar postmodernist occupation. But what about making a dance about a dance and its first audience? And blending in a contemporary audience, to boot? Think wheels within wheels, layers upon layers. The boggling idea comes off as a delight only when someone like avant-garde choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer tackles the project.

Rainer’s “RoS Indexical,” which received its West Coast premiere Thursday at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles, revisits the 1913 Paris premiere of the Vaslav Nijinsky-Igor Stravinsky ballet “Rite of Spring,” which sparked the most famous riot in dance history. Fistfights broke out in the audience, and the dancers could not hear the orchestra over the commotion.

Typically, Rainer approaches her work, created in 2007, through indirection. She uses the soundtrack of a 2006 BBC documentary, “Riot at the Rite,” which chronicled the premiere by dramatizing the audience’s reactions to the ballet.

Review: Los Angeles Ballet 'La Sylphide'

Try summing up the themes of August Bournonville’s romantic 1836 ballet, “La Sylphide.” You might get a list something like this: Dreams, illusions, ideals versus reality and worse — irrational, implacable evil. No wonder the ballet survives, not only to entertain but to trouble, even deeply disturb.

Los Angeles Ballet, founded in 2006, marked its latest stage of artistic growth by mounting a handsome production of “La Sylphide” Saturday at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, with period sets and costumes borrowed from the Houston Ballet. (Performances continue over the next two weekends at other venues.) (Freud Playhouse, UCLA, May 23 and 24, and at the Alex Theater in Glendale, May 30.)

The story is simple. James, a Scottish highlander, dreams of a magical, otherworldly creature, the Sylph, on the very day of his wedding to his beloved Effie. Suddenly incarnate, the Sylph lures James away from the wedding and into the forest. There, she inexplicably appears and disappears at will, always managing to stay just out of his grasp.

Review: Long Beach Opera in the hull of the Queen Mary

Long Beach Operahas a long history of audacious, innovative programming, but its latest pairing, Viktor Ullmann’s “The Emperor of Atlantis” and Carl Orff’s “The Clever One,” comes close to going off the charts.

Both works were composed in 1943 and share the common themes of dictatorship and ruthless repression. But the similarities end there.

“Emperor” is a dark, complex political allegory, composed in the Nazi German “showcase” concentration camp of Theresienstadt (Terezin). The second is a comic Grimm’s fairy tale, written by the ever-popular Orff (think “Carmina Burana”) who never joined the Nazi Party but who benefited during its regime.

The shock of juxtaposing these works, seen Friday in the Ship Hull of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, lingered long after the performance.

Terezin had first been billed by the Nazis as a Jewish retirement resort, although it was actually a way station for transport to the death camps. Cultural life somehow flourished there because of the large number of artists and musicians internred in the camp, including Ullmann and his librettist, Petr Kien.

Their opera, subtitled “Death Abdicates,” was scheduled to be performed — until SS officers saw the dress rehearsal. They became so outraged at its anti-Nazi theme that they immediately shut it down and shipped Ullmann, Kien, the entire cast, orchestra and their families to Auschwitz, where Ullmann perished. The score survived, although it was not premiered until 1975.

The story is simple. The tyrannical Emperor Ueberall declares a universal war in which there are to be no survivors. Death, however, is so outraged at this usurpation of his power that he refuses to perform his function. So a hanged man twists forever on the gallows, even after he is shot. Suicides fail. Opposing soldiers cannot slay one another; instead, they discover mutual humanity and even love. The world, though, mostly agonizes in a limbo between life and death.

Review: Helios Dance Theater's 'The Lotus Eaters'

Anyone who wants to make a dance about indolence has a problem. Dance is movement; indolence is not. So choreographer Laura Gorenstein Miller set a task for herself and her Helios Dance Theater when crafting “The Lotus Eaters.” This 10-part work, about 75 minutes long, premiered Friday at the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center.

Billed as a contemporary take on what is a brief episode in Homer’s “Odyssey,” Miller’s piece tells the story of Odysseus’ storm-tossed sailors cast up on an unknown island on their way home from the 10-year Trojan War. A few crewmembers eat the narcotic fruit that grows there and soon forget about home, duty and honor.

Miller presented the work in preview in October at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. But in collaboration with her 10 dancers, she reworked and expanded it for the Broad Stage. Her imagination, she said in a Times interview, was first sparked by seeing pieces of jewelry inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus Eaters.” Further research led to Homer.

In Tennyson, the sailors choose to stay on the island. In Homer, the sailors are dragged back, weeping, to their ship, cast in irons and thrown under the rowers’ benches, as Odysseus and his crew flee as quickly as possible. Unlike either source, Miller made the Lotus Eaters predatory; but like Homer, she let her sailors escape.

The dance began swiftly, with five leather-clad guys bounding and vaulting onto the stage, like dangerous, merciless warriors. Soon they met five languorous women in silvery tunics. With elbows and wrists bent in images evoking praying mantises, the women plucked invisible fruit out of the air and fed it to the sailors who fell at their feet in a dangerous swoon.

All that happened in about the first 10 minutes. So what was left to do? There followed slow duets and group sections, in which dancers carried one another on their backs, wrapped themselves in sensuous embrace or executed difficult partnering moves.

Eventually to change the pace, there irrupted an energized group section, followed by an agonized solo for Sandra Chiu suggesting that the Lotus Eaters were themselves victims; then, seemingly out of nowhere, Chris Stanley’s solo in which he dragged himself across the floor. This part was labeled “home.”
Miller’s choreography was sometimes ingenious, but it did not long sustain interest. The dancers, most of whom were new to the company, worked diligently.

Rob Cairns composed the pre-recorded music, with Grant-Lee Phillips singing several of his original songs. Rami Kashou designed the costumes along stylish, classical Greek tunic lines. Alison Van Pelt created the flowering tree backdrop.

Whatever its virtues for music, speech or drama, the Broad has a problem with sightlines for dance. From a seat midway back in the orchestra section, one saw the heads of the audience in the front rows popping half-way above the edge of the stage. They looked, whimsically, like old-fashioned stage-light covers.

One could more or less adjust to this fact. Still, the net effect was to prevent viewing a dancer’s body complete from head to toe, which creates a major difficulty in appreciating choreography. Because the seats cannot be lowered, this looks to be a permanent issue at the Broad, which otherwise is so accommodating to performer and audience. For all that, the audience seemed delighted with the Helios Dance Theater performance.

-- Chris Pasles

Review: Herbert Blomstedt guest conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic

Baroque music without theories: What blessed relief. That’s what guest conductor Herbert Blomstedt and the Los Angeles Philharmonic served up Friday at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In the bad old days, music was music, period, no matter when it was written and what the details of its original performance might have been. Then the specialists moved in, illuminating the field, to be sure, but also dividing it into do’s and don’ts, which soon became Thou shalt’s and Thou shalt not’s.

Blomstedt and crew said the heck with that. Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” is simply grand and glorious, so let’s play it with sumptuous sound on modern instruments, without tripping over issues of gut versus steel strings, or clipped versus legato phrasing, or whether to use vibrato, or how many musicians should be involved.

The trick, of course, is still to maintain transparency, balance, proportion and, especially, a lively engagement with the inner life of the music. All this, Blomstedt, who is a genial, undemonstrative but resourceful presence on the podium, had in full measure.

Review: In Noh drama, forgiveness occurs beyond the grave

The chance to kill one’s murderer -- how sweet it is and how astonishing to give it up and reconcile with the enemy. That is the climactic moment of Zeami’s 14th century Noh drama “Atsumori,” presented Friday at the Aratani/Japan America Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The performance was by principal actor Shizuka Mikata and four other members of the Kanze School of Noh in Kyoto, Japan, in the company’s first U.S. tour.

Immediately, the mind objects: How can a man kill his murderer? Numerous short stories, not to mention Hollywood and European films, however, have readily accustomed us to accept such impossibilities, although virtually none with the moral depth found in Japan’s oldest, most intricate theater-art form.

The story derives from an account of an epic battle between two clans to control Japan at the end of the 12th century. Atsumori, a cultured but naive 17-year-old, is killed by the older general Kumagai. Overcome with guilt at killing someone so young and inexperienced, Kumagai abandons his warrior life to become the priest Rensei.

Years later, on a pilgrimage, Kumagai encounters Atsumori’s ghost, who recounts the story of their battle and rushes to behead him. Realizing, however, that his opponent has spent years praying for him, Atsumori drops his sword. “No, Rensei is not my enemy,” he says. “Pray for me again, oh pray for me again.” The two achieve salvation together.

Noh is an art of deliberate slowness in which any fast gesture or movement takes on particular resonance. It also does not extol the actor-dancer in a self-aggrandizing manner. His skill is in disappearing in the role and through inner intensity engaging the viewer’s imagination to fill out scenic and emotional details and generate a shared dramatic experience. The musicians, too, are self-effacing, entering, playing and exiting with seemingly ego-less meditative concentration.

*UPDATE: Review: Gil Shaham breathes fitful life into Khachaturian

Coaxing, cajoling, beguiling, violinist Gil Shaham tried to build a case for bringing Aram Khachaturian’s once-popular Violin Concerto back to the mainstream in a performance Thursday night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Slim chance.

The Soviet Armenian composer wrote the work in 1940 for his brilliant compatriot, David Oistrakh, who championed it in performances at home and abroad during and after World War II. Audiences and Soviet officials loved it for its accessibility, Armenian-flavored sweet-and-sour melodies, Technicolor orchestration and rhythmic vitality. But with Oistrakh’s death in 1974 (as well as changing tastes), the grand-scale piece not so gradually dropped from sight.

Some younger violinists have recently taken it up, however. Shaham, unlike the stern-faced Oistrakh, displayed exemplary warmth and charm in his playing and proved no less virtuosic. On the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage, he was a wandering soloist, drifting now toward concertmaster Alexander Treger, now toward the violists, now toward the conductor, Stéphane Denève (above) -- with whom he shared beaming smiles -- and then toward the audience. (*UPDATE:  An earlier version of this review said the concertmaster was Martin Chalifour. It was Alexander Treger.)

He went into half-crouches to launch intense passages, rose partway as the energy built, reached full stature as the line matured and sometimes even passed beyond it to arch dangerously back on his heels and end with a flourish. All the while, his fingers danced up and down the fingerboard, making the difficult, often nonstop challenges look absurdly easy.

Review: Los Angeles Opera's "Magic Flute"

A first-class cast of principals making their Los Angeles Opera debut transformed the company’s revival of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday into a welcome delight.

This was the 1993 Peter Hall co-production with satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, with colorful Egyptian-style sets and costumes rich in symbolism. It is marred, though, by its dressing the high priest Sarastro and his retinue as golden-gowned look-alikes topped with “Planet of the Apes” haircuts and the hero, Tamino, like a redheaded, red-gloved and red-booted waiter in a Russian-themed restaurant.

Still, Scarfe’s fantastical animals were wondrous to behold, and the supernumeraries who artfully enlivened them deserved something better than listing by name in the program credits. On this occasion, Stanley M. Garner interpreted Hall’s often-pageant-style direction with workmanlike diligence.

Matthias Goerne as the Speaker represented luxury casting. The German baritone sang with warmth, amplitude and generosity of tone, radiating the calm one would expect from a member of Sarastro’s enlightened religious order. It was this serenity that induced Tamino to take his first step away from callow certainty.