Idomeneo

August 2024 · 5 minute read

With "Idomeneo" Mozart came into his own as an operatic master; the opera was produced in Munich shortly before he made his final leap into Viennese musical society to create the humanist operas the whole world would come to love. "Idomeneo" is also full of wonderful music, but it is somewhat harder to love.

With “Idomeneo” Mozart came into his own as an operatic master; the opera was produced in Munich shortly before he made his final leap into Viennese musical society to create the humanist operas the whole world would come to love. “Idomeneo” is also full of wonderful music, but it is somewhat harder to love, and the current Los Angeles Opera production — opening night of its 19th season at the Music Center — left some of its problems unsolved.

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The opera stands for the final gasps of the old-fashioned style that Mozart would soon lay to rest. Its plot substance is solid old stuff — human dilemmas resolved by godly intervention, youthful manly bravery set into soprano throats, arias demanding repetitions of sentiments already expressed. A 1990 L.A. Opera “Idomeneo,” with cute fairytale sets by Maurice Sendak, employed the slasher’s hand of Frank Corsaro and came in at a comfortable two-hours-plus; the new version, kinder to Mozart if less so to an audience on a sweltering summer night, filled three hours and then some and still showed several gaping wounds in both plot and musical consistency.

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Never mind. “Idomeneo” is a fascinating hybrid with enough Mozartian sublimity to placate the most ardent admirers of the genre. The opera occupies a certain unique pedestal in that its title role has enough gristle to attract the era’s top supertenors who overpower most other Mozart roles; indeed, Luciano Pavarotti made his debut as Idomeneo at Britain’s Glyndebourne. Placido Domingo has recorded it and sung it widely, and could by now be at a point of reconsidering; there was little Mozartian velvet in his opening-night performance, and even the grand heroism sounded unusually strained. Most of the 20-or-so minutes cut from the final act were from his big scenes.

Otherwise, the performance under Kent Nagano, in a production from the Flanders Opera, fulfilled the ideals of 18th-century performance dimensions, with particular dazzlement by Veronica Villarroel as Elettra, opera’s first certifiable nut case (and, possibly, most useless role). Michael Vale’s set consisted of a backdrop of several large panels that picked up Tina McHugh’s lighting attractively and split apart to allow room for the requisite god Neptune to deliver his final verdict. The most important staging problem in operas of this genre consists of getting the chorus on and off the stage on time and in a body; director Vera Lucia Calabria managed this most handily.

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Idomeneo

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Music Center; 3,098 seats;$190 top

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