Photos courtesy: LA Philharmonic
Symphony’s wunderkind is building a reputation as an opera conductor: “It’s important for symphony orchestras to perform opera, specifically Mozart”
Consider yourself lucky if you got yourself a ticket to Los Angeles’ most awaited “haute culture” event of the month, and possibly of all time. LA’s “Opera Month“ launched May 12 to a sold-out audience with LA Opera’s revival of its signature La bohème production that showcases opera’s new fast-rising star couple Stephen Costello and Ailyn Pérez. LEARN MORE about La Bohème …
But it is on May 18 when A-list personalities from far and wide can be expected to descend on the famous undulating titanium building across the street to experience the morphing of LA’s architectural and acoustical landmark into a veritable opera house. A celebrity event three times over, and here’s why:
1.) The world’s hottest chef d’orchestre (Gustavo Dudamel) unveils to the world what has been announced as LA Phil‘s fully-staged production of Mozart’s operatic masterpiece, Don Giovanni.
2.) Set design is by the country’s architect du jour in his first stint as a stage designer-Frank Gehry, whose game-changing design of Walt Disney Concert Hall transformed the City of Angels.
Gehry’s preliminary trademark doodle (left) represents his vision of a “moving still-life on the stage” that works in concert with the costumes and supports the music.
The orchestra is placed on raised lifts approximately three and a half feet upstage so as to focus on the action happening downstage and to foster intimacy between the soloists and audience. The choir benches will be removed to allow space for the orchestra. Says Gehry of the project: “This is an inspiring opportunity to work with my friends at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This is a project very close to Gustavo Dudamel’s heart. He knows the music like the back of his hand, and has a unique vision that I find very exciting.” Sketch courtesy: LA Philharmonic
3.) Costumes are by couture’s most celebrated fashion designers in their first foray into opera: the inseparable nerd-sisters Mulleavy (Kate and Laura)-Berkeley-educated tall-young-ladies-from-Pasadena, and unlikely self-taught founders of the house of Rodarte. Their first costume designs ever were the much publicized tutus for actress Natalie Portman and the corps de ballet in the Oscar-winning film, Black Swan.
As it turns out, the sisters have a strong personal connection with opera. Their maternal grandmother, who had been sent by her parents in Italy to live with an uncle in New York during the Depression, became an opera singer. Thus they consider it another gift of good fortune to have been chosen to work very closely with the iconic Gehry whom they’ve discovered to be a kindred spirit. “Working with Frank Gehry in the concert hall that he designed, alongside Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a dream.”
In turn, Gehry says: “Kate and Laura’s work reminds me of my early days – it is free and fearless and not precious.” Their red-splashed sketch of the costume for Donna Anna (at right) gives one an idea of what to expect. Modern. As they put it, “The velvet-and-heels look of the past is out of the question.” Their design goal was to create costumes that would provide a timeless context for understanding Mozart’s characters, bringing together tradition and their unique point of view-which in its final evolution is one in which all the characters are the Don’s creations, existing only with one another in a self-contained, abstract universe.Sketch courtesy: LA Philharmonic
Stage direction is by the acclaimed American opera director Christopher Alden who took over the directorial reins after the original director-designate, Scottish-born Paul Curran, stepped down from the project because of scheduling issues. Alden is known for his use of contemporary imagery and, on occasion, minimalist visual style. He has an eye for bold theatrical gestures that are dramatically effective and his approach to stagecraft is driven by a desire to reveal how powerfully opera stories can resonate with modern experience. Alden has said that “however fascinating the era in which an opera was composed may be, I have a primary responsibility to the world we live in now.” That being said, Alden assures opera cognoscenti that his abstract approach to the staging, without ties to any specific time or place and thus very much in sync with the Mulleavys‘ costume designs, will be totally in the service of Mozart‘s beautiful music.
The opera features Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien in the title role. Recognized as one of the leading Don Giovannis of his generation, he heads an international cast of fast-rising young singers that include American bass Kevin Burdette as Leporello, Italian lyric soprano Carmela Remiggio as Donna Anna, Polish soprano Aga Mikolaj as Donna Elvira, Slovak Pavol Breslik as Don Ottavio, English-Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska as Zerlina, American bass-baritone Ryan Kuster as Masetto, and Slovak Stefan Kocan as the Commendatore.
Don Giovanni is the first installment of LA Phil‘s ambitious three-year Mozart/Da Ponte Trilogy Project, a Dudamel brainchild hatched over coffee at a Starbucks in Berlin while dreaming about future projects with his wife Eloísa Maturén and LA Phil President Deborah Borda. Dudamel believes it’s important for symphony orchestras to perform opera, specifically Mozart, and for this particular project, he thought who better to do the sets than Gehry. It was Eloisa’s bright idea to bring in fashion designers for the costumes. Thus was the project born, with Don Giovanni as the first of three partnerships with three different sets of influential architects and fashion designers on the three beloved Mozart/Da Ponte masterpieces to be produced over three seasons-Don Giovanni in 2012, La nozze di Figaro in 2013, and Così fan tutte in 2014. Each complete opera, to be conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, will be a first for Walt Disney Concert Hall.
LA Phil is of course not new to opera. Concert versions of operas have always been a part of the orchestra’s vast repertoire, and semi-staged productions are becoming a regular feature of each season. Recent standouts during Esa-Pekka Salonen’s distinguished tenure as LA Phil’s Music Director include: The acclaimed “Tristan Project” - an ingenious production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that incorporated video art, directed by Peter Sellars; and Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, likewise directed by Peter Sellars, which made creative use of folk art-based Ethiopian thrones and masks by the artist Elias Sime. More recently in 2011, LA Phil world-premiered the Prologue (for 11 solo voice parts and a chorus). to Orango, a long-lost, four-act opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, rediscovered in 2004, of which only the Prologue appears to be extant.
Neither is this production Dudamel‘s first stab at opera, fully-staged or not. Casual Dudamel watchers may be quick to dismiss his operatic conducting experience. The “Dude” himself would not dispute this assessment. After all, he’s only 31! A concert version of Bizet’s Carmen at the Hollywood Bowl in 2010 marked his American opera debut, and in 2011 again at the Bowl, he conducted Puccini’s Turandot. And so, this Don Giovanni will be his first fully-staged and only his third time to conduct a complete opera in LA, or the US for that matter. But one must be reminded that his world is bigger than all of LA. When he’s not in LA, much of his professional time is spent guest-conducting one or the other of the world’s great orchestras-symphonic music, OF COURSE! but also OPERA. Indeed, most all the great symphony conductors of the modern world were/are great opera conductors too. Or at least, opera was a major building block in their careers. Examples abound, from the 19th century onward. Think Mahler, Furtwangler, Strauss, Toscanini, Walter, Klemperer… And closer to our own times - Bernstein, Karajan, Solti, Levine, Abbado, Muti, Barenboim…. There must be something compelling about opera that propels, almost inevitably, a great symphony conductor down to the opera pit. Or for that matter, makes a great orchestral composer write opera, even if not everyone succeeds. It was Mozart himself who said:
“Opera, to me, comes before everything else.”
The late great Australian symphony and opera conductor Sir Charles Mackerras put his finger on it:
“A good orchestra, fully trained, will be able to play most symphonic works of the classical period without any conductor at all… However, an opera cannot even begin to be performed without a proper conductor directing the whole proceedings…. There is, therefore, a feeling among orchestras that, although they do not really admire symphony conductors so much, they have a grudging respect for opera conductors, because they realize that opera conducting is so much more difficult and complicated. The general suspicion that orchestra players have of conductors is a great deal more prevalent in the concert hall than in the opera house, where the smallest mistake can show up the conductor. The actual training of an opera conductor is, in a way, much more stringent than that of a symphony conductor. The opera conductor must be able to play the piano, and give the listener a good impression of the sound of the orchestral score. He must know a great deal about singing and the problems that singers face.”
Will Gustavo Dudamel make the list? By his own admission, he loves opera. At his inaugural press conference as LA Phil’s then 28-year old Music Director, he unabashedly proclaimed, humbly acknowledging both an ambition and a limitation:
“I’m in love with Wagner now. Maybe in the near future, in five years, six, I will conduct Wagner.”
And one gets the feeling that he’s working hard at it, given his (fully-staged) opera fact sheet to date:
La Scala (debut / Don Giovanni - 2006)
Berlin Staatsoper (L’elisir d’amore -2007)
Berlin Staatsoper (La Bohème - 2008)
Berlin Staatsoper (Don Giovanni - 2009)
La Scala (Carmen - November - 2010)
La Scala (Rigoletto - November 2012
La Scala (Aida (China tour) - 2013)
Clearly, he is honing his craftsmanship in conducting the art form. What better place than at the most iconic of opera houses. They must love him at La Scala! As much as we do in LA. - G. Cajipe Copyright © 2012
P.S. A note about Don Giovanni:
Don Giovanni has been praised to a point of near unanimity through well over 200 years. Some of the most notable opinions:
“I can only say that I consider Mozart the greatest composer alive and on Giovanni the greatest opera I have ever heard.” - Franz Joseph Haydn (composer)
“The opera of all operas.” - E.T.A. Hoffmann (author, composer, jurist, critic, etc. and hero of Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann”
“The greatest opera ever composed, eminent in virtue of its uncommon share of wisdom, beauty, and humor” - George Bernard Shaw (playwright, author, critic)
“Don Giovanni is one of the funniest shows in the world and one of the most terrifying. It is all about love, and it kids love to a fare-ye-well. It is the world’s greatest opera and the world’s greatest parody of opera. It is a moral entertainment so movingly human that morality gets lost before the play is scarcely started.” - Virgil Thomson (composer, critic)
“There are three things in the world I love most - the sea, Hamlet and Don Giovanni.” - Gustave Flaubert (novelist)
These glowing words are the most eloquent testament to Mozart, whose genius transformed a set of tales with an indisputably unexalting theme-debauchery of the lowest order!-and layers of moral ambiguity into a magnificent work of art universally praised as the most exalted of operas!
A timeless masterpiece of many virtues, Don Giovanni can be enjoyed on many levels: for its incredibly beautiful music alone, as the dramma giocoso or humorous drama it was originally classified to be, as a complex metaphor for the human condition seen through the masks of Mozart’s prismatic characters, or as the morality play implicit in Mozart’s choice of subtitle, Il Dissoluto Punito or “The Dissolute Punished” - a morally unambiguous reference to the unrepentant Don’s famously fiery ending.
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DON GIOVANNI Performances:
FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2024 at 8 p.m.
SUNDAY, MAY 20, 2024 at 2 p.m.
THURSDAY, MAY 24, 2024 at 8 p.m.
SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2024 at 8 p.m.
WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, 111 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles
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