Christopher Alden’s May 2013 production of Le Nozze di Figaro at Walt Disney Concert Hall was part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s multi-season presentation of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas. From left: John Del Carlo, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Ann Murray
Nights at the Opera
A venerable tradition is revitalizing the orchestra experience.
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otal immersion: that was the radical brand of opera Richard Wagner hoped to inaugurate at Bayreuth. To enhance its effect, he famously made the “invisible orchestra” an integral part of his design. Yet the overall ideal of intensified theatrical illusion remained frustratingly out of reach, hampered by the limitations of the stage technology of the time. Cosima Wagner reported her husband’s sardonic joke in the aftermath of his deep disappointment over the first complete Ring: “Now that I’ve created the invisible orchestra, I’d like to invent the invisible stage!” The concert hall has meanwhile long provided an appealing milieu in which to experience opera with another kind of im-
Craig T. Mathew & Greg Grudt/Mathew Imaging/Los Angeles Philharmonic
by Thomas May
mediacy—one that focuses on the musical dimension of this most collaborative of the arts and, far from disguising the orchestra, features it as the central character. And recent innovations that involve this format for presenting opera are even helping, in some cases, to redefine the orchestra’s institutional identity and sense of mission. A new era of co-productions involving artists from other disciplines, the choice of thematically meaningful repertoire, marketing centered around concerts that include a visual and theatrical element as a special “event” of the season: all these are different facets of how opera in the concert hall has evolved in recent years. The links between some of America’s most venerable orchestral institutions and opera are deeply rooted, whether in concert presentations (Frederick Stock’s legendary Tristan with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1935 and Dimitri Mitropoulos’s programming of complete operas with the New York Philharmonic in the 1950s) or symphony
fall 2013