Los Angeles. (North America).(Brief Article)

Given the geographic proximity of the Los Angeles Music Center to the region's other major cultural industry, you'd expect a close working relationship between Los Angeles Opera and the surviving shards of the film industry. You'd be wrong, however; in the company's seventeen years of operation, memories only of Herbert Ross's spunky La Boheme, Bruce Beresford's lurid, Hollywood-ized Rigoletto--and, best of all, Maximilian Schell's monumental Lohengrin at the start of this past season--celebrate what should be an ongoing performing-arts entente.

At season's end, the ranks were memorably joined by William Friedkin (acclaimed for The Exorcist and The French Connection) in an odd couple of one-act operas: Bartok's moody, mysterious Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's deliriously wise Gianni Schicchi. Friedkin and designer Gottfried Pilz proclaimed both works cut from the same cloth: both, after all, had their premieres in 1918; both include--the Bartok at the start, the Puccini at the close--a spoken exhortation meant to be delivered in the language of the audience.

Samuel Ramey sang both title roles, vividly and with great intelligence; Kent Nagano conducted both operas in like virtue. The sets, too, were of a piece--cleverly so. A chandelier in the Bartok, collapsed on the ground with arms outstretched like a tarantula about to strike, gleamed in its proper place during the Puccini. A spiral staircase, a seeming passage between heaven and hell in the Bartok, became a handsome frame for Dante's Florence later on (with the Signoria tower still a-building on the skyline, a pardonable anachronism to the modern dress onstage). One of the ghosts of Bluebeard's wives--airborne, uninhabited nighties, actually--stayed on after intermission to fly once again as the departing spirit of old Buoso Donati breathing his last.

It proved one of the company's best evenings--stirring, provocative and delightful. Bartok's phantoms were mostly handled by Paul Pyant's brilliant lighting designs--a dazzling wash of blood-red and gold, a chilling whiteness as Judith looked upon a lake of tears, an almost palpable blackness at the end, as Judith walks to her doom and (a nice Friedkin touch) Bluebeard returns to the scene with yet another wife. Life, as well as death, goes on. A thread of sorrow, or perhaps regret, lent added color to Ramey's lines; as the doomed Judith, Denyce Graves mingled her usually mellow tones with a rather tentative delivery of the Hungarian text.

Visual anachronisms aside, Gianni Schicchi was a wonderful amalgam of Italian roughhouse comedy (think Big Deal on Madonna Street) and loving wisdom--the latter most of all in Ramey's richly comic subtlety. Danielle de Niese sang "O mio babbino caro" most prettily; as her suitor, Rinuccio, Rolando Villazon contributed a fine array of ...