Los Angeles Opera

Those who've been awaiting the L.A. debut of Ruggero Raimondi will have to wait a little longer. The venerable Italian bass was supposed to make his first appearance with the Los Angeles Opera as Doctor Dulcamara on Sept. 12 in the season opener, Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore" ("The Elixir of Love"). But the company has just announced that the 67-year-old singer ruptured an Achilles tendon during rehearsal and must withdraw from the production. In his place, Italian baritone Giorgio Caoduro will assume the role of Dulcamara.

When indefatigable Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon began his engrossing pre-performance talk before "Siegfried" on Saturday, a blazing midday sun was directly overhead at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. By the time he finished conducting the long opera, day was done. The sky had reddened but not brilliantly enough to compete with the glow lingering from director Achim Freyer's carnival of light inside or from Wagner's music. Los Angeles Opera's ring around the "Ring" has come to the third opera of the tetralogy and the one most challenging to make convincing onstage.

In the theater, technology has been a boon and a bane. Since the introduction of science to the stage three decades ago, it has transformed the way shows are put together. "It pervades everything," says Alys Holden, director of production for Center Theatre Group. "Lighting, video -- which is its own subset -- sound and scenery, where automation is huge." Progress on the artistic side has been more erratic. There have been plenty of breakthroughs, such as the blending of media and genres to create new art forms or the use of virtual gaming to redefine "audience participation."

James CONLON, who became music director of the Los Angeles Opera in 2006, is about as busy these days as a conductor can be. This afternoon, he leads Verdi's "Otello," a concert that comes after Saturday night's scheduled performance of two works in his beloved "Recovered Voices" project, devoted to presenting operas suppressed by the Nazis -- Viktor Ullmann's "The Broken Jug" and Alexander Zemlinsky's "The Dwarf."

They're all outsiders, drawn to Los Angeles from such established creative hubs as New York and Chicago by the potential of a city they see as still defining itself culturally. They speak with confidence about the role that the arts can play in Los Angeles, and declare their willingness to work together to expand arts education and possibly sponsor a major citywide cultural initiative, such as an arts festival.

British early music specialist Harry Bicket took the helm of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall, UCLA, on Sunday, leading muscular, invigorating performances of early Mendelssohn, a familiar concerto by C.P.E. Bach and Haydn's final symphony. No stranger to Los Angeles, Bicket won hearts and minds conducting Monteverdi's "The Coronation of Poppea" and Handel's "Giulio Cesare" for Los Angeles Opera in 2006 and 2001, respectively.

HOW DO you add sparkle to a fatigued operatic war horse? Bring out the jewelry and let it shine under the spotlight. But not just any old jewelry. For its latest revival of "Tosca," opening Saturday, Los Angeles Opera has obtained a rare stage artifact -- the jewelry worn by Maria Callas in 1956 for her Metropolitan Opera debut as Giacomo Puccini's tragic heroine.

When Los Angeles Opera opens its final offering of the season, Puccini's seldom-heard "La Rondine," tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the offstage creative team will represent a curious coincidence. The director of the production, Marta Domingo, is married to the company's general director, Placido Domingo. And giving the downbeat in the pit will be conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, whose husband just happens to be Peter Gelb, general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera.

Puccini's "La Rondine," which Los Angeles Opera revived Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, is a problem. Even the composer had second and third thoughts about it. He wrote one ending for the 1917 premiere in Monte Carlo but devised a different one for the first Palermo performance in 1920. He was considering other changes, but the final published score reverted essentially to the first version.

IN his office at London's Covent Garden, Peter Mario Katona keeps a thick file of hate mail. The Royal Opera's director of casting even framed one particularly unquotable letter and hung it on his wall. His sin? Firing American soprano Deborah Voigt before she could sing her signature title role in Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" in 2004. Her sin? She was too fat to fit into Ariadne's little black dress.