COMMENTARY AND LINKS: Is this the best that L.A. Opera can do?

I begin with a major caveat: I haven’t seen The Fly, the new opera co-commissioned by Los Angeles Opera that opened its local debut Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and don’t plan to. I didn’t like the short story or the two movie versions (1958 and 1986). My reaction when I heard that Placido Domingo had joined in commissioning an opera version with music by Howard Shore and a libretto by David Henry Hwang was “Why bother?”

Moreover, L.A. Opera’s track record with commissioning new works isn’t all that impressive. Deborah Drattell's Nicholas and Alexandra was awful and Grendel two years ago wasn’t much better, in my estimation (to be fair, opinions on the latter were decidedly mixed but I don’t ever remember talking to anyone who had anything good to say about Nicholas and Alexandra).

One of my rules of music criticism is that if I’m going to review a concert, opera, recital, etc., I have to be able to approach it with an open mind. If not, I simply won’t go. So, I’m passing on The Fly. Nonetheless, I hoped that my fears would prove groundless. No such luck.

Here I offer a second caveat: if you’ve seen The Fly and loved it, then you might want to skip the balance of this commentary, although, from what I’ve read, you’re in a distinct minority. Critics are not perfect and I’ve been to my share of concerts when I’ve disagreed with my colleagues in print, but when four people — Tim Mangan in the Orange County Register, Alan Rich, Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times and Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times, whose musical knowledge and writing I respect — are in pretty much total agreement in their negativity, then I am left shaking my head sadly. By the way, they’re not the only ones; I have yet to find a single positive review of The Fly.

What seems to be the major questions in all of this are (1) why Los Angeles Opera continues to commission new operas, (2) why its track record is so woeful, and (3) why the company can’t seem to integrate successful new operas into its repertoire.

Even acknowledging that musical organizations have a responsibility to uncover new works in order to prevent their genres from degenerating into museums, when a company like L.A. Opera misses the mark so many times, it does no one any favors. Mounting a new opera is an expensive proposition, both for the company and for those who attend; from a purely financial standpoint, you’d think the board would by now be asking questions of Placido. Everyone’s allowed a dud once in awhile, but all LAO is doing in this case is, at a minimum, causing potential patrons to question the wisdom of attending any production.

So, why can’t the company seem to get it right? One reason, at least in my estimation, is it keeps choosing composers either with little or no experience in opera or whose compositions can, by no stretch of the imagination, be considered first-rate. This company is too big, and its ticket prices too high, to justify such gambling.

Finally, I wonder why Opera Pacific was able to jump on The Grapes of Wrath for its current season instead of L.A. Opera. I’d much rather buy tickets to an opera that, while unknown locally, has garnered the sort of ecstatic reviews that Ricky Ian Gordon’s adaption of John Steinbeck’s famous novel has achieved. I know that opera schedules are planned years in advanced, but Opera Pacific seemed to find away around those problems, in this case. Why didn’t LAO?