The Wallis Opens with Graham, Verdi Blows Out Candles

By Donna Perlmutter

An illustrious  opening of a Beverly Hills performing arts complex, the Annenberg Wallis. A nod to cultural icon Martha Graham. Also to Giuseppe Verdi, with his delectable last opera, “Falstaff.” What else could we say but huzzahs all around?

As the Wallis’s first offering, there was the Graham company -- which has not toured L.A. since 2000. Too long.  After all, it was marvelous Martha who put modern dance on the map, starting in the 1930s and defining it as the most exhilaratingly theatrical art form to probe the human psyche.

And surely there could be no better welcome back to this city than a bid to inaugurate the Wallis -- a 500-seat theater set in a landmark: the restored, lavishly marbled Beverly Hills post office, a rendition of Italian Renaissance. She would have loved it. Especially the spacious stage with ample wing space and terrific sight lines afforded by the raked rows of seating.

But with Graham long gone -- she died in ’91, running her company and even appearing onstage right up to the end at 96! -- it’s  good to see that the current dancers are equal to the same stunningly high level as those in today’s top troupes.

What’s more, the bill of fare just seen on the Wallis stage gave its audience a deliciously full spectrum of Graham’s historical importance -- from the Denishawn days of exotica and floating gossamer, on to that period when modern dance wrapped itself around political-moral issues.

The program -- planned and narrated by company stalwart, director Janet Eilber, formerly one of Graham’s major dancers -- made its mark throughout.

Once again we could think of Käthe Kollwitz’s expressionist woodcuts when Katherine Crockett performed “Lamentation,” Graham’s famous 1930 solo --  sitting on a bench and shrouded in silk jersey, her arms and legs twisting and stretching that garment into angled folds of grief, her hollowed out facial features gripped with feeling, speaking the unspeakable.

Similar angst characterized “Chronicle,” an outcry against war, with group dances that were riveting in their sense of defiance and their uniquely austere formations.

But it was “Maple Leaf Rag” -- a cleverly jokey poke at Graham herself, via emblematic quotes from her own movement vocabulary -- that sent the crowd home happy. For some others, though, the grandiloquent and overly glitzy “Ritual to the Sun,” set to Carl Nielsen’s “Helios” Overture, looked like someone’s misbegotten gloss on the choreographer’s signature.

Originality returned the next night, though, with LA Opera’s new production of  “Falstaff,” the Verdian romp that exults in briskly buoyant, multi-part vocal lines and prismatic orchestration so full of fine glitter it fairly lifts off  to the sky.

A connoisseur piece by any measure, it serves to celebrate the composer’s 200^th birthday. What’s more, it turns the tables on those who regard Verdi -- exclusively -- as the emperor of Italian opera’s deep-felt tragedies like “Traviata” and “Rigoletto.”

This one is a comedy. Verdi and his librettist Boito created their Boccaccian delight as an odd little treatise on pre-Renaissance morality (courtesy of the Bard’s “Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Henry IV”). It’s built around a fallen aristocrat with delusions of importance  but with philosophical/psychological underpinnings.

We think back to 1982 when the great god-like maestro Carlo Maria Giulini led the LA Philharmonic in a wholly high-value production with an all-star cast and how, whenever LA Opera revives it, thoughts turn to those performances.

Happily, there were no disappointments or even oddities or directorial revisions this time. And while conductor James Conlon may not have lingered over the lyric heavenliness of its short-lived melodic strains he certainly let them soar and gave great propulsive vitality to the bustling activity captured in the score.

Adrian Linford’s traditional designs made for easy access. And director Lee Blakely kept the stage action lively, possibly losing some of the lesser roles’ character definition.

But the main order of business comes down to Sir John Falstaff, and in his portrayal of the fat knight Roberto Frontali made a superb case. First off, his baritone has a full range of tone and expressive color, and you hear the singing line in all of his musical phrases. He even gave off hints of an Italian Renaissance Zero Mostel as an adorable dumpling dressed to the nines for his courting caper -- although not issuing utmost cranky wisdom in the “honor” monologue.

The other standout was Ronnita Nicole Miller as Mistress Quickly, the schemer who leads him to his comic disaster: a dump in the River Thames. Ekaterina Sadovnikova sang prettily as Nanetta, but without making us forget the alluring voice of Barbara Hendricks (who could?), while Juan Francisco Gatell was a quite wiry-sounding Fenton.

Performances through Dec. 1 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Disney Stages a Surprise and 3rd Time's the Charm for "Carmen"

by Donna Perlmutter

Defying all odds, Disney Hall celebrated its 10^th anniversary without so much as one official standing on stage to bestow thanks to long lists of benefactors or indulge in blandishments and platitudes.

Yes, Gustavo Dudamel fronted his LA Philharmonic and welcomed the capacity crowd to Disney. “A miracle,” he called it, that single word summing up the concert venue’s brilliant acoustic and architectural wonder.

But this was no ordinary birthday gala. It was wholly a tribute event to Frank Gehry, the man who patiently took his lumps over the years, yet managed -- through controversy, dispute and economic sputtering -- to create the citadel atop the hill at First and Grand that visitors from around the world flock to see.

The surprise factor turned out to be the architect’s persona in the hall -- via his voice heard on audio. What a homey and folksy voice it was, uttering the private words, almost comic and sometimes self-mocking à la Jules Feiffer, explaining how his designs came into being, how they doodled onto a page, only to get crossed out and tossed, over and over again before reaching a final draft.

And at evening’s end Gehry was brought onstage, in suit and tie, no fancy-dan tux  -- even then without a trace of starchy pomp or self-importance, only a few humble, half-embarrassed bows but mostly gestures to the players and their maestro, amid a mylar confetti drop.

The main revelry, though, came with the music, a smartly programmed hour that showed off the orchestra in sterling form. True, there were intrusive screens everywhere, a Hollywood Bowl leftover.  (Even before entering the hall Gehry’s more philosophic quotes were projected onto walls of corridors and lobbies, portending something scarily ex-cathedra-like).

But if you were lucky enough to sit in a side section -- for this time only -- it was possible to look directly onto the stage and avoid seeing the screens. That way you could hear the music without the sensory distraction of unrelated visuals (a montage of  other occasions, other conductors). And when that music is so compelling do you really want a non sequitur smack in your face?

No such disturbance entered the scene when Yo-Yo Ma, everyone’s favorite guest-star cellist these days, was on hand -- granting Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme his utter refinement, elegance and poise in gorgeous balance with the band, expertly managed by its chief.

In fact, the orchestra played everything superbly, back again in its rightful residence. And that included Adès’s “These Premises Are Alarmed,” a gloriously wild thing that lives up to its title and generated the players’ bracing, clarion excitement.

Dudamel also took a bracing tack with the Rondo Burleske from Mahler’s 9^th Symphony -- which he powered in with ultra-fast fury. His way with the organ movement of Saint-Saëns’s 3^rd Symphony required some ear-stuffing, for those protecting their hearing, but he and his cohorts ended on a sentimental note, with a tenderly lush, glittering “When You Wish Upon a Star,” honoring the Hollywood icon and the hall’s namesake, pictured onscreen.

Across the street at the Music Center Pavilion honors also came to LA Opera, by way of Bizet’s “Carmen” -- with the same production it borrowed from Madrid and mounted here twice before. But this time, thanks to Trevore Ross directing a wholly alive cast, every moment on stage counted.  And with Plácido Domingo’s masterly guidance of the pit orchestra,  issuing the score’s delicious sweetness and ardor, all kinds of narrative business also became illuminated.

Carmen, for instance, left alone in the smuggler’s camp to brood over her distressful love triangle, brought the third act to a climactic close, angrily flicking her cigarette in a cadential flourish with the last bold chord.

Otherwise, Irish mezzo soprano Patricia Bardon -- vocally sound if not lustrous -- made only a somewhat convincing Gypsy hellion in the title role and was more of a tough cookie than a sensual dynamo.

But Brandon Jovanovich, with a gradual warm-up to the naïve soldier’s  ultimately obsessional, manic despair, gave a performance worthy of an Oscar.  It was his and the defiant Carmen’s own human bull fight -- she, testing the limits of life and love; he, determined to possess her -- that took place outside the arena. With each rigid, tense step he stalked her as in a dance of death. His murderous finale was more gripping than that of any Don José I’ve ever seen -- a rarity in opera because singing, by itself, takes utmost focus. And his darkly resonant tenor did not disappoint.

Other cast members kept up the high standard. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo was a wonderfully animated and agile Escamillo, not the stolid mannequin usually trotted out to sing the “Toreador Song.”  (Both he and Jovanovich sang for the company before in productions that had, seemingly, absentee directors. Redemption at last, on a grand scale...)

First timers in this “Carmen” were South African soprano Pretty Yende, a Micaëla of silvery tone and gratifyingly natural demeanor as the Madonna interest, and Valentin Anikin, a corrupt Zuniga whose basso sounded as though it got swallowed in a cavern.

But the whole enterprise was absorbing. Set designer Gerardo Trotti’s sun-drenched first act boasted a lovely, long perspective of a palm-tree-lined Seville street, and men in Jesús del Pozo’s  summery pastels wearing borsalinos and berets.

Granted, there was no gritty realism here, no graffiti-scrawlings on walls as depicted in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s landmark production, nor any attempt at a Peter Brooks deconstruction. But Bizet in his own Opéra Comique style, carried out with this degree of attention, is irrefutably captivating.