Thinking big, in short bursts

Though a modest company, Long Beach Opera, which offers a short season each June at Cal State Long Beach, has never thought small. And just because the departing general manager, Michael Milenski, who founded the company in 1978, began this year’s season Sunday afternoon in the Carpenter Center with “Seven Small Operas� doesn’t mean that, after 25 years, he is suddenly no longer intrepid. It is no simple matter to present a program of miscellaneous operas that range in length from six to 15 minutes. Opera tends to be a long, often luxuriously long, medium.

For his starting point, Milenski reached back to 1927, when the composer Paul Hindemith had the radical notion of commissioning mini-operas for a new music festival he ran in the German spa town of Baden-Baden. The briefest, “L’Enlevement d’Europe,� by Darius Milhaud, came in at just under 10 minutes. Two years later, Milhaud added two more miniatures -- “L’Abandon d’Ariane� and “La Delivrance de Thesee� -- at 11 and eight minutes, respectively, and grouped them together as “minute operas.� They are legend in opera history, but highly impractical to stage and seldom seen.

This whimsical trilogy formed the first half of the Long Beach program. Condensing Greek mythology, the operas revolve -- as their titles suggest -- around the themes of abduction, abandonment and deliverance. In the first, Jupiter, disguised as a bull, steals Europe away from her fiance, Pergamon. When Pergamon shoots an arrow at Jupiter, the god turns back the arrow and kills the attacker. In the second, Theseus abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos and takes up with her sister, Phaedra. The third is the tragedy that results when Phaedra, after marrying Theseus, becomes attracted to her stepson, Hippolytus.

These are standard stories of tragic French opera and high drama, and the very act of condensing them would have been perceived, especially by the French, as irreverent. But the French composer and his librettist, Henri Hoppenot, went an insouciant step further by debunking operatic and theatrical conventions. Choruses, arias and duets are not just pithy but flippant. The chorus, for instance, moos erotically in the background as Jupiter the bull makes love to Europe.

Yet Milhaud’s winning music is also a marvel of concision, full of temperament and fleeting melodies that reveal a surprising amount of character. Isabel Milenski’s spirited staging, Darcy Scanlin’s set of movable cubes and patio furniture, and Anna Bjornsdotter’s costumes of old-fashioned two-piece bathing suits displayed all the attitude that has distinguished this plucky young team in more ambitious productions for the company. The cast is full of hard-working, enjoyable singers. Among them, John Dukyers, though his voice is frayed, proved a delightfully irreverent Theseus, Dana Tash offered a radiant Ariadne, and Catherine Ireland delivered a forceful Phaedra. Andreas Mitisek, who will become the company’s general manager next season, conducted a small instrumental ensemble with great style.

The four other short works, staged by Melissa Weaver, were not so successful. Two of them weren’t technically operas. In Ravel’s delicious song cycle “Don Quichotte a Dulcinee,� the baritone, Jeff Morrissey, awkwardly hovered around his Dulcinea -- in this case, the pianist who accompanied him, Ellen Milenski. Oddly enough, he sounded more unnerved than she.

In Monteverdi’s lament “Lagrime d’Amante al Sepolcro dell’Amata� (Tears of a Lover at the Tomb of a Beloved), taken from his Sixth Book of Madrigals, four somber singers hovered around a dead maiden, who then came to life and became the soprano. Karim Chieck-Ali, who supplied some witty choreography for the Milhaud operas, was the hand-wringing, fetal-positioned dancer. The singers were from the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

The final two operas were new. In Robert Moran’s “Remember Him to Me� -- at just under six minutes, the shortest work -- four men in tuxedos and orange T-shirts sing a Gertrude Stein text while engaging in campy high jinks. The piece, which uses an accompaniment of piano four-hands and percussion, only hinted at Moran’s rapturously melodic minimalist operatic style and his outlandish theatrical sensibility, but those hints were refreshing.

Nicholas Francis Chase’s “Twenty-two (Taker of the Total Chance)� revisits the flamboyant, avant-garde style of the 1960s without adding anything new. The text by Ann Haroun -- in which a ribbon of light hits the sea, setting atoms and critters all a-shimmer -- was an unfortunate choice, poetically obscure and cornball at the same time. Kerry Walsh (Light) and Tany Ling (Water) were the brave singers. The stage glittered with tiny lightbulbs. Ling perched on high wearing what looked like the world’s largest plastic garbage bag. Kristof Van Grysperre conducted a small ensemble with huge, ostentatious gestures.

*

‘Seven Short Operas’

Where: Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach

When: 4 p.m.

Ends: June 21

Price: $35 to $65

Contact: (562) 439-2580