Commentary: How exuberant, ambitious operas in L.A. score big despite small casts and modest budgets

Los Angeles Times

28-02-2025

Los Angeles is no opera oasis in the sense of Berlin or Paris, which have nightly choices. Our opera comes and goes, fickle as flood-drought weather. Right now it's pouring chamber opera. February has, in fact, been something of an ad-hoc L.A. chamber opera festival.
Last week alone, four premieres around town created an atmospheric river of chamber opera and opera-like works, home-grown and imported. All were different in musical and theatrical style and, somewhat, in intent. Importantly, all proved relevant, speaking to the moment in ways unique to the medium.
For opera on a reduced scale — small casts, small instrumental ensembles, small spaces — intimacy replaces grandeur. Smaller budgets allow for bigger ideas. There is room for experimentation, immediacy and risk. Such opera can be done pretty much anywhere, indoors or outdoors, and pretty much anything goes.
Better known for reinvention than status quo, L.A. is, in fact, a chamber opera town of renown. The ad-hoc festival began with a celebration of the Industry, the most impressive opera lab in America, and a wave goodbye to its founder, Yuval Sharon, who has taken the revolution to Detroit Opera, where he is artistic director, and to the Metropolitan Opera, where he will face the greatest challenge of his career attempting to mend the company's old Wagnerian ways with radical new productions of 'Tristan und Isolde' and the 'Ring' cycle.
Next up, the Wallis in Beverly Hills hosted the U.S. premiere of a marvelously multimedia opera of ideas and imagery on the subject of exile. 'The Great Yes, the Great No' got a great big yes. It was created by William Kentridge at his South African opera lab, the Centre for the Less Good Idea. African and European musical forms, exuberant visual design and a wide-ranging text explored, with universal implications, the lasting ways deportation affects identity.
Early on in its history, Long Beach Opera, originally Long Beach Grand Opera, found the 'grand' too ceremonious and increasingly scaled back to experimental, in-your-face intimacy. Last week the company presented its most radical performance ever to begin an audacious season completely composed of Pauline Oliveros productions. To call 'El Relicario de Los Animales' — an exercise in singers and instrumentalists expressing their inner animal — an opera may seem a stretch. But it happened to include a performance by a noted traditional mezzo-soprano, Jamie Barton, that already sets a high standard for operatic performance of the young year.
The production began with Oliveros' 'Thirteen Changes,' a series of activities or images — standing naked in the moonlight, a singing bowl of steaming soup — with the extravagantly dressed performers in the nooks and crannies of Heritage Square. The reliquary itself, held in the square's church, was a series of exceedingly odd musical interactions between vocalists and the instruments in a combination of rap session and organized mystical service. The sounds, those seductively embracing and those frightfully howling in the wind, became an acknowledged life in all its strangeness, the animal kingdom as counselor to our uncertainties, indulgences and differences.
This was also the week that Los Angeles Opera took its annual break from its grand pedestal at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and presented the West Coast premiere of another opera from Beth Morrison Projects at REDCAT. Mary Kouyoumdjian's 'Adoration' is an adaptation of Atom Egoyan's 2008 film in which a Canadian high school student of mixed race comes to terms with prejudice.
Looking at reality through various cultural lenses, the deceptively elegant film is a nuanced deliberation on Simon's fantasy, planted in his imagination by his racist grandfather, that his Lebanese father was a terrorist. The opera, with a workable Royce Vavrek libretto, is less concerned with the issues than the characters and what's inside them, something opera is designed to do.
The instrumental ensemble is but a string quartet. This is Kouyoumdjian's first opera, but she has been writing string quartet music of theatrical power for the past decade and has been championed by the Kronos Quartet. A new Kronos recording devoted to those works will be released in early March, and it features pieces with narration about war and peace in the Middle East that are grippingly theatrical. 'Adoration' feels like a natural next step. The string quartet conveys a mystical atmosphere. Her lyric vocal writing contends with harsh reality, but her style is never far from profound rapture.
Unfortunately, the opera itself doesn't transcend other realities. Complex issues are simplified in Vavrek's libretto. An agile production directed by Laine Rettmer includes a stylish minimalist set by Afsoon Pajoufar and a fine cast headed by Omar Najmi as Simon. The string quartet and conductor Alan Pierson are hidden and amplification is overly loud, adding its own emotional emphasis. Egoyan, who wrote the appreciative liner notes for Kouyoumdjian's Kronos recording, is a talented opera director. May composer and director one day make an opera together.
Coincidentally, the Kronos, with three new members, were in town last week at the Wallis for the Southern California premiere of Michael Abels' 'At War With Ourselves — 400 Years of You,' for string quartet, narrator and chorus. Abels is best known as a film composer ('Get Out,' 'Us,' 'Nope') but also has opera credentials, having shared a Pulitzer Prize with Rhiannon Giddens for 'Omar.' Here he elaborates, line by lyrical line, on an eloquent poem about social justice by Nikky Finney. Her expressive reading of it was as much song as speech. The L.A. chorus Tonality brought a sunlight that made the text flower. It would not be far-fetched to present this as exalted music theater.
Lastly, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo gave the world premiere last weekend (with a repeat this coming Saturday and Sunday) of Daniel Kessner's 'The Camp' at the Aratani Theatre.
This was the most traditional of all the chamber operas.
Its sentimental and rhyming libretto by Lionelle Hamanaka follows a Japanese American family during their World War II incarceration, leaving little room for meaningful music. But the story is moving in its treatment of how different generations dealt with tradition in a hostile environment.
'The Camp' has many advantages. Kessner, an L.A. composer and flutist, elevates the drama with pastoral beauty and serene tenderness. Set designer Yuri Okahana-Benson's skeleton structure in the modestly unfussy production evokes the kind of sets that Isamu Noguchi once designed for Martha Graham. These are well suited for Kessner's Copland-esque score (with subtle Japanese bits) for a superb mixed chamber ensemble conducted by Steve F. Hofer. Diana Wyenn's direction, suavely natural, never intrudes.
The large cast is led by the compelling baritone Roberto Perlas Gómez as Mas Shimono, the father whose world crumbles around him as he tries to maintain traditional values. Kessner's opera, too, holds on to traditional opera values in a changing world and makes them and chamber opera matter.