Around Town - LA Opera Lohengrin - Not Much To Love

I have to admit that I was really looking forward to the opening night of Lohengrin.
Wagnerian Score + LA Opera's Creativity + James Conlon's Conducting = Awesome Night Out
Well, not exactly.
Let's just start with set and costumes.
The classic German mythical tale of the god/knight Lohengrin arriving on a swan to champion Elsa, the noblewoman who has been wrongfully accused of fratricide, was set in a snowy field hospital in a ruined church at the eve of World War I.  The stage was dark, the costumes were dreary and we all got the reference to the Caspar David Freidrich painting of the Cloister Cemetery in the Snow.

The tale was a struggle over control, isn't it always?

Lohengrin a resurrected soldier saved Elsa, from her foes, then made it all the way to the marriage bed with her.  But in usual female fashion, she screwed everything up by her insecurity. She asked the fatal question as to his identity and after he sings the sad story he must get back on his swan and leave giving up his one chance to return to mortality. Naturally, Elsa collapses and dies.

In other words there was no ultimate redemption through love.

My problem with the opera wasn't the singing.  It was lovely.

The two sopranos sang exquisitely and the chorus was brilliant.

What I couldn't take was the lack of visual interest. 

No matter how beautiful the voices, the set was dark and visually boring after the first 20 minutes.....and the same set is a lot to have to look at for a 4 plus hour opera.  And worse, the lead characters were costumed so poorly, particularly Lohengrin, that it made it hard to accept them as hero and heroine.

It was impossible to recognize that this was the opera that inspired the Ludwig II to build Neuschwanstein.

At $250 per ticket the Los Angeles Opera needs to come up with better productions if it wants to attract a new generation of subscribers.  If the LA Opera doesn't provide more of a wow factor, the young culture vultures of LA will not fill the seats of the Dorthy Chandler Pavilion.

Soldier? Saint? Sorcerer? Savior?

Snore?

Around Town - The Stigmatized at the LA Opera

Overall opera is a difficult art to appreciate. While some opera's are easily watched and enjoyed, such as Butterfly and Turandot, more often than not they are challenging, complicated, hours long and require simultaneous reading while watching the events on stage if you aren't familiar with the story or fluent in multiple languages. James Conlon's production of Franz Schreker's 'The Stigmatized' was one of these difficult operas but definitely worth seeing.

The story is set in fin-de-siecle Genoa with a plot that is marked by the Freudian undertones of the outside appearances and the internal decadence of the characters. There is ugliness and beauty and lust in the story, and of course a completely naked girl in a simulated rape scene on stage....because this is the LA Opera, and there are always naked girls and sex on the LA Opera stage.
The score is rich and romantic and sounds more like a film score than an opera. There are no snappy arias that you can hum to yourself later. While the Viennese Schreker is compared mostly to Strauss, I felt that his music was more akin to that of Korngold whose work was used both in opera and in film. Certainly Korngold must have been influenced by Schreker.

The singing by German soprano Anja Kampe, as the artist Carlotta, was extraordinary. She blew everyone away, including the lead tenor Robert Brubaker, as the crippled aristocrat. The set design was kept purposely simple in order to act as a background for a rich lighting design with elaborate projections. It was very beautiful production visually.

Here's the description from the LA Opera.
World-renowned conductor James Conlon continues the critically lauded, groundbreaking Recovered Voices series with the first-ever production in the Western hemisphere of any opera of Franz Schreker. The New Yorker commented that the work "vacillates between melodies of Mediterranean grace and textures of otherworldly complexity...One scene melts into another with cinematic ease."


Sadly, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center wasn't full and the average age of the audience was about 65. For a new generation raised on film, video games, twitter and instant gratification, I'm afraid that opera will be a lost art.