LA Opera's Spring Gala

Los Angeles Opera: Spring Gala
Verdi- Otello Act IV
Strauss- Die Fledermaus, Act II
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles

A gala is a gala: mildly entertaining, fun here and there. LA Opera's gala did its job - it looked like plenty of folks were on hand to donate some cash, and the on stage activities were enough to make the rich folks chuckle.

Musically, there were some thrills. Act IV of Otello was a rather odd choice to start off the evening. As the culmination of Verdi's opera, it's a highly dramatic scene (that's where, of course, the lovers die in the Shakespeare play). And there isn't much grand singing in the way you would expect from an opera gala. It was very well sung by Placido Domingo and Patricia Racette, but a puzzling choice nonetheless.

Act II's staging of the second act of Die FLedermaus was much more fun, though mostly because of the special guests stars who came on to sing some pretty songs. The list was: Ruth Ann Swenson singing a song from "Kismet", Charles Castronovo, Verónica Villarroel, Mark Delavan singing the Soliloquoy from "Carousel" (very, very odd gala choice since its a character monologue: its as though someone got up in the middle of a wedding reception and recited a super dramatic Shakespeare sonnet), and finally Angela Georghiu and Roberto Alagna. Georghiu and Alagna nearly blew the roof off the house and basically made the whole evening worth it.

But Fledermaus presented puzzlements of its own: do opera people think that opera comedy is actually funny? The jokes in Fledermaus were just corny and lame, and the entanglements that the characters found themselves in - running around the stage using gimmicky disguises - were barely chuckleworthy. This kind of opera comedy just isn't funny. I guess the well-heeled subscribers chuckled enough, but I don't think good comedy is on the list of opera's strengths.

What is opera's strengths is soaringly beautiful music, and we only got hints of that on Wednesday. Domingo's dramatic intensity, Georghiu's soaring soprano and rapturous stage presence. That's what opera is good at, and too bad the gala didn't give us more of that.