Operetta review: 'Moscow, Cherry Town' by Long Beach Opera

Dmitri Shostakovich isn’t the first name that springs to mind when the conversation turns to musical comedy. In fact, it might be the last. But one of the Soviet composer’s lighter works, an operetta that premiered in 1959 called “Moscow, Cherry Town,” has been dusted off by Long Beach Opera to remind music lovers that there was more to Shostakovich than somber symphonies and dire string quartets.

Presented at the Center Theater in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, the production, which can be seen at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Wednesday and Santa Monica’s Barnum Hall on Sunday, makes a better case for the enduring charm of Shostakovich’s score than it does for the freshness of the libretto by Soviet humorists Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky. As theater this is mildly enjoyable hackwork, noteworthy mostly as a curious historical footnote.

What raises the level is the festive irony of Shostakovich’s music, with its biting commentary hidden behind a smiling facade. LBO artistic and general director Andreas Mitisek capably conducts a modest-sized orchestra through the varying shades of ebullience, from bright optimism to black comedy to some middle ground where communal laughter takes arms again a sea of despair.

Opera review: Trimpin's 'The Gurs Zyklus' has its premiere at Stanford University

Gurs was not a famous Nazi internment camp, we learn in Trimpin’s music theater oddity, “The Gurs Zyklus,” which had its premiere in Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University Saturday night. But as a way station in the French Pyrenees for Jews destined for Auschwitz, it was, we are told, cruel enough in its day. Inhuman enough. Many died there of exposure or disease or starvation.

“The Gurs Zyklus” (The Gurs Cycle) makes no attempt at re-creation or reenactment of the horror of Gurs. Nor is the production particularly effective theater. But in what must be the most curious example of Holocaust art ever, it is a cabinet of wonders.

Trimpin, a German artist long based in Seattle who goes by that single name, is an inventor of ingenious sound sculptures. And his opera, if you want to call it that, includes four singers and an actor/narrator. There are also projections. Still, Trimpin’s quirky contraptions littering the stage sustain the work.

Opera review: Centennial 'Der Rosenkavalier' at San Diego Opera

This post has been corrected. Please see note at bottom for details.

Richard Strauss’ instant and ever-popular “Der Rosenkavalier” -- a period operatic farce about sex and aging and renewal that turns unexpectedly profound and contemporary -– had its premiere in Dresden on Jan. 26, 1911. This year's “Rosenkavalier” centennial, however, has garnered surprisingly little attention.

New productions of Strauss’ opera are few anywhere and performances are especially rare this season in the United States. But San Diego Opera stepped up to the plate Sunday afternoon. Not only has the company mounted “Rosenkavalier” for the first time in 19 years, but its “new” production couldn’t be older.

A true commemorative event, this “Rosenkavalier” is an adamantly traditional one that Lotfi Mansouri first mounted for San Francisco Opera in 1993. Sets by Thierry Bosquet are patterned after the Dresden originals by Viennese painter Alfred Roller.

To its credit, San Diego Opera has gone through considerable effort with mixed but not unimpressive results. It has also, with this production and performance, opened up a couple of cans of interesting worms.

Opera review: Philip Glass' 'Akhnaten' at Long Beach Opera at last

Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten,” his third opera, had its premiere in Stuttgart, Germany, in a 1984 Achim Freyer production of such visual splendor it nearly the overwhelmed mesmerizing music and even the ancient Egyptian pharaoh who radicalized ideas about art and god. Glass has written more than 20 operas since then, but "Akhnaten" remains special.

Saturday night, Long Beach Opera presented a new production of “Akhnaten” at Terrace Theater. The adventurous company hardly has the resources to match those of Stuttgart’s state-supported Württembergische Staatstheater, where the Freyer production stayed in the repertory for several years. Long Beach gets just one repeat on March 27. And as he often does, LBO’s artistic and general director, Andreas Mitisek, began the evening Saturday with a whimsical fundraising pitch. Then he put on other hats -- conductor, stage director and production designer.

Mitisek was not responsible for the intermittently splendid choreography. And he had help from a video whizz who created dazzling stage pictures out of thin air. Still, this had the feel, for better and worse, of a one-man show not fully worked out.

It was an unevenly sung, staged and played “Akhnaten.” The budget constraints took their toll in a reduced orchestra with many of the brass parts consigned to an incontinent synthesizer. But none of that could lessen the significance of the first full-scale production in Southern California of a major opera by America’s best-known and most influential opera composer, erasing a shocking cultural omission.

Opera review: Los Angeles Opera 'The Turn of the Screw'

Although a putative ghost story, Benjamin Britten's “The Turn of the Screw” is not a supernatural opera. Spirits serve only to remind us of ourselves -- our forbidden desires and our apprehension of otherness.

In 1991, Los Angeles Opera mounted a nightmarishly unnerving production by Jonathan Miller that showed all the characters at their worst in this 1954 opera of smothering sexual insecurity and the tragic loss of innocence. Now, 20 years later, the company has made something of a clean sweep with Jonathan Kent's production imported from Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England.

In fact, as mounted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Saturday night by Francesca Gilpin, the new production all but sweeps the most fevered psychological dirt under the rug.

Opera review: Peter Sellars stages Handel's 'Hercules' in Chicago

CHICAGO -- The discourse of war is interminable.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Sophocles, who had experience commanding troops, considered war’s unspoken effects on society in “Women of Trachis.” There, Hercules discovers the ultimate horror of war is returning home unfit for domestic life.

Handel further revealed how wartime estrangement can destroy peacetime peace in his 1745 operatic oratorio “Hercules,” based in part on Sophocles' tragedy. The Age of Enlightenment, however, was not so enlightened. “Hercules” flopped. Even now audiences tend to shy away from Handel’s merciless survey of psychic breakdown.

Friday night it was Peter Sellars’ turn to speak the unsaid in a ruthlessly intimate, psychologically penetrating production and spellbinding performance of Handel’s “Hercules” at Lyric Opera of Chicago. On the day that Mayor Richard M. Daley posed cutting a gaudy birthday cake to celebrate this city’s 174th birthday, Sellars, in a talk before the performance, reminded operagoers that one third of Chicago’s homeless are veterans and that post-traumatic stress syndrome is tearing lives apart.

In Handel’s drama, Hercules returns from his onerous labors knowing only combat. He is uncommunicative. His wife, Dejanira, has endured years of lonely uncertainty. Hercules brings home a beautiful young prisoner, Iole, and Dejanira suspects infidelity. They bicker incessantly.

In hopes of reviving their relationship, Dejanira gives Hercules a jacket soaked in what she believes to be a love potion, but she has been tricked. It is poison. With the garment fused to Hercules' skin, he dies in anguish. The horrified Dejanira snaps and commits suicide, calling for whips of scorpions to lash her ghost. Iole and Hercules’ son, Hyllus, vow to make a better world.

In Sellars' staging, Hercules is an American soldier in combat gear just returned home from the Middle East. Iole is brought in wearing the orange jump suit of a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, and she sings her first aria from under a hood.

Opera review: Musica Angelica stages Mozart's 'Zaide'

There was once a time when opera and theater audiences couldn’t get enough of the fantasy of a fetching European slave who catches the fancy of her captor, a Turkish sultan. She went by many names.

For Voltaire, she was Zaïre. In opera, Bellini gave us “Zaira.” We meet Zaida in Rossini’s “The Turk in Italy” -- which opened at Los Angeles Opera on Saturday -- here disguised as a Gypsy in Naples after fleeing the sultan. Zaide also happens to be the title character of an early Mozart singspiel, or spoken and sung drama. And by a remarkable coincidence, Musica Angelica presented three semi-staged performances of “Zaide” over the weekend in Pasadena and Santa Monica,

The local period instrument ensemble attempted a clumsy updating of Zaide to pouty American teen, but then Mozart's opera is a torso that invites contributions from musical and theatrical handymen, and Musica Angelica at least found a believable young soprano for the title role. Mozart, in his early 20s and reaching his early mastery of operatic form, abandoned the work when the commission for “Idomeneo,” his first major opera seria, came along. Then, instead of completing “Zaide,” he pressed on with a similar story for his first great comic opera, “The Abduction From the Seraglio.” Some scholars speculate that Mozart wasn’t satisfied with a pat happy ending (just as Rossini wasn’t for his Turkish opera, and he farmed out his Finale).

Opera review: 'The Turk in Italy' by Los Angeles Opera

“The Turk in Italy.” The title sounds tired. Milanese operagoers in Italy thought so when Rossini’s “Il Turco in Italia” had its premiere at La Scala 1814. The idea was old, already used by other composers, and "Turco" was a flop.

Although Maria Callas helped retrieve “Turco” from obscurity in the 1950s, the opera remains somewhat of a rarity. Music director James Conlon, who led the first Los Angeles Opera production of “Turco” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Saturday night, believes in it. And so, after this witty, wonderful performance, will many more.

For all its froth, “Turco” tackles a sensitive subject more pressing than ever. We laugh knowingly but anxiously, recognizing the timely, touchy topics of immigration, racism and sexual exploitation.

Opera review: 'Anna Nicole' premieres in London's Royal Opera House [Updated]

London’s hi-toned Royal Opera House was festooned with Anna Nicole Smith on Thursday night for the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole.” Her image was on shopping bags placed over the heads of mannequins displaying lavish traditional opera costumes in classic Royal Opera productions. Portraits of the late, tragic, overstuffed Playboy playmate with hands supporting cleavage, diamonds galore and a big party smile, were simply everywhere.

Arts organizations in London, facing crippling cuts in government funding, are being asked to pursue private sources along the lines of the American model. But who would have thought that Royal Opera would pursue the lines of that American model?

Still, fallen, flawed femme fatales from all walks of life (including low life) have long turned on opera librettists. The heavy-breasted tabloid queen is a subject more tawdry than most, and she gets a tawdry, if entertaining, opera to match.

Turnage may have chosen more classic subjects for his previous two operas -- “Greek,” an updating of ancient tragedy, and “Silver Tassie,” an adaptation of a Sean O’Casey World War I drama -- but he regularly turns to jazz, rock and blues sources. His recent short and disappointing orchestra piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “Hammered Out,” reworks a Beyonce song.

Opera review: Mike Figgis directs 'Lucrezia Borgia' for English National Opera

LONDON -- The talk of the town here is “Anna Nicole,” British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s reportedly tragicomic opera about the late Playboy playmate and sex symbol. At Covent Garden, Royal Opera is coyly keeping even a plot synopsis under wraps until opening night Thursday. But for anyone in need of sex and scandal on the lyric stage, a 10-minute walk to the London Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, should serve just fine.

The city’s nimble, national and traditionally daring second company has been doing this kind of thing for years. With its provocative and riveting production of Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia,” for instance, filmmaker Mike Figgis sets the scene with nudity, intercourse, incest, degradation, description of gang rape -- as well as animating naughty Renaissance paintings -- in four short films that are used to give proper historical context to an otherwise fictional 19^th century Italian opera.

What is attracting attention (and causing mild controversy) with Figgis’ new production, however, is his inclusion of these four films.

On screen, he introduces beautiful actors and actresses, sumptuously shot in stunning historical settings, portraying the legendarily wicked Lucrezia, her psychopathic brother Cesare (who is not in the opera) and their father Pope Alexander VI (also not in the opera) in all their enticing decadence. The soundtrack includes interesting electronic mixes of Donizetti’s score.