Review: James Conlon turns to Mozart and magic for his L.A. Opera farewell
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A site of big changes, the Music Center has become farewell central.Alongside the Gustavo Dudamel hullabaloo at Walt Disney Concert Hall, James Conlon has begun his final appearances in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as music director for two decades of Los Angeles Opera, with his own signature form of enchantment in Mozart’s “Magic Flute.” The silent-movie panache of Barrie Kosky’s production, which opened Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and runs through June 21, is on its way to becoming a perennial.
This is the third revival since L.A.Opera first staged it in 2013 — all four times with Conlon in the pit.
The production operates like an operatic graphic novel and live animated film charmingly all in one.The scene is a giant movie screen broken up in sections and upon which is projected witty, fantastical background animation, while the characters are the live singers, dressed as though silent film stars.The orchestra plays Mozart’s score as though it were, as orchestras did in the old days, accompanying a silent movie but to radically different effect.
Fulgurous cinematic spectacle may immerse your attention, but the opera’s essence is transferred from the stage to the pit.The singers, meanwhile, function to an unusual degree as choreographed characters in a cartoon, leaving little opportunity for body language, allowing, instead, individual expression almost exclusively to their voices.In Mozart’s opera, Tamino, a prince in a fairyland of mystic temples and mystifying gods, relies on his supernatural flute that turn sorrow into joy to get him out of jams.
The genius of Kosky’s singularly musical production is that it magically makes the orchestra itself a compendious magic flute.It more than ever becomes an agent of delight.That is where Conlon comes in.
He has, while leading L.A.Opera for 20 seasons (half the company’s existence), served...