Los Angeles. (North America).(Lohengrin, Queen of Spades)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)(Review)

Nobody has ever suggested that running an opera company -- let alone two companies the width of a continent apart -- might be an easy diversion for Placido Domingo. Nobody need be all that startled, therefore, by the few dark rumblings around the edges of the glory at the start of the Domingo era at Los Angeles Opera. True, the two operas that inaugurated that era -- the company's first-ever Queen of Spades on September 4 and Lohengrin eleven days later -- did indeed rank as spectacular achievements, as fine as anything in recent memory on the Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage. Yet, there were rumblings.

On September 9, the London Sunday Times ran a doom'n'gloom article on the company's financial woes, specifically on the enormous outlay -- some $36.5 million, it was intimated -- it would take to realize Domingo's dream project, the George Lucas-designed Ring slated for the 2003-04 season. The company's directors, the article claimed, were up in arms, a not unfamiliar stance by the famously conservative Board. "Nonsense," responded a company spokesman in a protesting letter, but three days later another bomb was dropped: the resignation of executive director Ian White-Thomson after only a year on the job. Against this background, the New York tragedy and its aftermath had cast a further shadow, obliging the company to shuffle and reschedule. The first Lohengrin, scheduled for a black-tie premiere on September 12, was pushed back to a dress-Californian matinee on September 15.

Even so, the shape of the company's triumphant rebirth was easy to discern. In the fifteen years of Peter Hemmings's leadership, there had been no Russian-language opera. (A Queen of Spades had been announced for 1990 but dropped.) Aside from a Tristan, memorable more for the David Hockney designs than on musical grounds, and Julie Taymor's gimmicky Dutchman, Wagner had been given short shrift. Several of Hemmings's bravest ventures had been undercut by impoverished leadership from the podium. Here, then, was a new beginning in which three previous major deficiencies were dramatically erased. The best news of all was that the two conductors involved -- Valery Gergiev and Kent Nagano -- now have long-term commitments to the company: Gergiev for an annual visit, Nagano in the newly created post of principal conductor.

Domingo's madman-hero was familiar coin from the Met's Queen of Spades of 1999; so was Gergiev's urgent, fiery leadership. (Gegam Grigorian -- the Gherman on the Gergiev-led video of the opera -- assumed the role in later performances; Gianandrea Noseda took over the podium.) On opening night, Domingo's sixty-year-old pipes were still in remarkable condition, his stage presence the woolly-bear galumphing that passes for acting throughout his vast repertory. Galina Gorchakova was his Lisa, as at the Met, impassioned if somewhat soft of voice. Sergei Leiferkus was the robust Tomsky, Vladimir Chernov the Yeletsky; Susanna Poretsky, winner of one of ...