Review: James Conlon begins his final L.A. Opera stretch as music director with a mission

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James Conlon has begun his long goodbye as music director of Los Angeles Opera, and he does so by boasting big numbers.Twenty seasons with the company (half its history).

More than 500 performances of 70 different operas at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and occasional neighboring venues, such as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.But only 10 of the operas have been comedies.

The life of a music director at a major opera company is inevitably one engaged in tragedy, and Conlon exhibits the dramatic flair to grip its emotional immensity.Yet he is exiting by showing that, when it all comes down to it, he prefers laughter to tears.The two main stage actual operas he leads in his final season (the other was “West Side Story”) happen to be the most sublime and insightful comic operas to have ever reached the lyric stage.They are works that don’t just make you feel good but make the world feel good.

One, Verdi’s “Falstaff,” is currently at the Chandler, and that will be followed in May and June by Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”Friday night, Conlon further upped the comedic element in a gala farewell concert at the Pavilion that included extended excerpts from two more comic operas that most illumine the human condition: Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.”All four of these so-called comic operas go far beyond genre.Sunday’s performance of “Falstaff” was followed by a talk between Conlon and British actor, writer and startling wit, Stephen Fry.

In a rollicking monologue, Fry described all opera as comedy, tragedy merely being the result of idiotic egos incapable of levity.He gave the example of Iago in Verdi’s “Otello.” Had Otello understood that all the world is a joke, as Falstaff startlingly reveals at the end of the opera, Iago would never have been able to poison Otello’s susceptible frail ego with his ...