He lacked low-end menace, and Tresnjak overdid the witchy kitsch. The first show of the fall season was Darko Tresnjak’s staging of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” with Domingo in the title role, continuing his effortful late-career transition to baritone parts. It’s as if two distinct opera companies shared the same name. The split between Domingo’s fare and the contemporary offerings-which reflect the tastes of the organization’s C.E.O., Christopher Koelsch-can be disconcerting. Since 2003, its general director has been the ageless Plácido Domingo, who also sings in tried-and-true repertory once or twice a season. Opera, which is housed primarily in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, disdains the past. Its fall repertory included “Akhnaten,” Philip Glass’s saga of ancient Egypt, and “The Source,” Ted Hearne’s meditation on Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. Opera’s size-the budget is forty-one million dollars-is more committed to new and unusual work. Opera, in 1986, it was relatively free of the entrenched conservatism that has hemmed in older houses. On the other hand, when opera finally took root, with the founding of L.A. Philharmonic, which now has an annual budget of a hundred and twenty-three million dollars and remains, by far, the wealthiest classical-music organization in Southern California.

The all-powerful Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times and controlled vast tracts of real estate, threw its weight behind the L.A. showed little interest in parading their finery in opera boxes, as the Morgans and the Vanderbilts had done at the Met, in New York.

In bygone days, the moneyed classes of L.A. This turned out to be no bad thing for the city’s spirited, unpredictable modern scene. Illustration by David Doranįor most of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was the only American metropolis without a full-fledged opera house. Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” had a spooky grandeur.

La opera philip glass