FROM AROUND THE WORLD: LOS ANGELES.(Brief Article)

Last year, when departing Los Angeles Opera general director Peter Hemmings passed the orb and scepter into new hands, he spoke to the press about a possible strengthening of company ties with the local cinema community. A flashy "Rodeo Drive" production of Rigoletto, directed by Bruce Beresford of Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant fame, was part of Hemmings's valedictory season.

Now that Placido Domingo and Ian White-Thomson have assumed their respective posts as artistic and executive directors, astounding new plans for LAO have materialized, most of which deal with commissions (Luciano Berio, Deborah Drattell, John Williams), conductors (Kent Nagano and Valery Gergiev, among others), collaborations (the Kirov and Berlin Deutsches Symphonie Orchester) and contributions (more than $20 million from Alberto Vilar).

Few of these plans have much to do with Hollywood directly -- although a production of Wagner's Ring cycle with special effects designed by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic (Star Wars) is a notable exception. But in October (as planned by Hemmings before his exit from Los Angeles), Peter Grimes, directed by Academy Award-winner John Schlesinger, emerged as the first unqualified success of LAO's 2000-2001 season.

Though co-produced with Teatro alla Scala (where it was first presented, in July), this Grimes was purportedly not "a cookie-cutter presentation of the Italian performance," or so Schlesinger stated. Copy or not, Los Angeles audiences saw a superbly conceived musical-dramatic event guided by a man who clearly knows how to extract screen-worthy histrionics out of opera singers. Everybody onstage was more than ready for a close-up. Sadly, no one appeared to be videotaping the performances.

As the opera's ...