From one adventurer to another

It would be natural for Michael Milenski, who’s about to step down as general director of Long Beach Opera, to be overcome with joy, sorrow, regret or triumph -- or some combination of them all -- on his final season.

The company, which he started in 1978, eight years before the creation of Los Angeles Opera, has built a reputation for its inventive, even radical productions of contemporary and older works, from John Cage’s collage-like 1990 “Europeras 3 & 4” to Monteverdi’s 1643 “Coronation of Poppea,” set in a corporate boardroom.

It’s been called everything from “the hippest opera company in the nation” to a producer of “G-rated porn.” Its current season includes Offenbach’s 1868 opera bouffe “La Perichole,” today and next Sunday, and “Seven Small Operas,” most of them contemporary and obscure, which debuted last Sunday and will be repeated Saturday. Both programs go up in the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center.

Now, Milenski is relinquishing the helm of this adventurous enterprise. He will become director emeritus in October, when principal conductor Andreas Mitisek takes the reins. But if he has strong feelings about his departure, he’s mostly not telling.

“Nearly every waking moment for the last 25 years has been dominated by thinking about this opera company,” says Milenski, 61, an intense, confident figure who nevertheless exudes a certain weariness. Asked what it’s like contemplating a new life, he says: “I don’t think about it too much. It seems indulgent.”

Ultimately, he says, with a cadence that could have come from a Beckett character, “I could not have gone on, would not have gone on. I’m finished.”

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Conventional start

Long Beach Opera came into being after Milenski -- who had studied Italian literature at Berkeley and then went to work for San Francisco Opera and San Jose Symphony instead of completing his doctorate -- moved to the Southland at the invitation of some members of the Long Beach Symphony. They wanted to make what he recalls as “a serious attempt to initiate opera.”

Its first production, with members of the Long Beach Symphony in the pit, was a traditional production of “La Traviata” that Milenski says only “hinted at what was coming.” The group became sharply less conventional in the early ‘80s, as he grew intrigued by the possibilities of operatic spectacle, contemporary music and familiar works rethought.

A turning point came in 1983, with a production of Benjamin Britten’s “Death in Venice,” directed by Christopher Alden. Alden, who has gone on to stage productions in opera houses around the country, calls the Britten opera the launching pad for both him and the company. (Other Long Beach Opera alums include sopranos Catherine Malfitano, Deborah Voigt -- who was part of a workshop for local singers in the early ‘80s -- and Ruth Ann Swenson.)

Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffman” took on a new, darker mood when it was performed in 1986 and set in New York’s East Village. More recent productions have been similarly unusual. Long Beach staged the Moliere-Charpentier “Imaginary Invalid” in 1999 with sets by L.A. architects Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung; Strauss’ “Elektra,” in 2001, became the story of a contemporary teenager in torn jeans who lived, in Times critic Mark Swed’s words, “just west of the Valley of the Dolls.”

With a board of directors made up primarily of Southern California opera enthusiasts, plus a scattering of university professors, visual artists and people from outside the region, the company’s budget reached a peak of about $850,000 in the late ‘80s.

The budget for the 2002-03 season was $500,000. An average year has seen two or three productions; one year, 1994, the company staged seven, while in ’96 it offered only one.

That year, Long Beach canceled two productions and then signed an agreement with Cal State Long Beach, moving its performances to the university’s Carpenter Center. Milenski, who’s lived in Long Beach with his wife for many years, became a university lecturer.

Alden’s last assignment with Long Beach, after 17 productions over a decade and a half, was the contemporary piece “Hopper’s Wife” in 1997. “The soprano was naked for the first third of the opera,” the director remembers. “Only in Long Beach. It’s an astonishing way to run an opera company.”

Rehearsing “La Perichole,” a few members of the company are gathered in a band practice room at Cal State Long Beach.

The setting is informal: A few picnic tables and chairs stand in for the set, and David Schweizer, a veteran of the L.A. theater world known for adventurous work, is directing wearing tight black jeans and a beige shirt that could have come from the movie “Swingers.”

The leads, Cynthia Jansen and James Schaffner, play young lovers, and in the scenes they’re rehearsing, they’re alternately flirting with and confronting each other. The French libretto has been converted to English, and much of the stage direction is about getting the chemistry between the principals right, making sure their lines sting properly.

“Notice that they’re both young and fun and physical,” Milenski whispers. Maintaining that mix has been his company’s challenge for a quarter of a century.

Mitisek, 39, who’s about to assume that challenge, is playing piano behind the singers. He lives in Vienna, where he ran an avant-garde theater company until 1997, but Long Beach is now his only steady commitment.

“I’d love to have an apartment at the ocean,” the boyish conductor says with a laugh. “Can we afford that?”

“He’s very well taken care of,” Milenski says in a scolding tone.

The relationship between the men has a father-son quality: Milenski often says things like “This boy thinks big” or “This boy can sell himself.” Although he says he’s tired of talking up Mitisek, he’s obviously proud of him, especially his conducting and his roots in one of classical music’s most august capitals.

“He’s got the goods,” Milenski says. “You can imagine my genuine relief that there’s someone to carry on the work we’ve done here.”

He’s proud too that for all the company’s left-field staging, “the music remains in its purest form. This is something that Andreas helps bring to it. We may rewrite the mood, but we don’t rewrite the style.”

To some, it’s this combination of avant-garde and conservative -- a balance likely to remain under Milenski’s successor -- that made the company work.

“In his goofy way, he never went too far,” Patrick Smith, a former editor of Opera News, says of Milenski.

Smith calls Milenski a rugged individualist but one with a sense of his and his institution’s limits.

“He’s not such a collegial fellow. He never wanted to join anything, be on panels or anything. His company hasn’t grown, and he hasn’t wanted it to grow. That’s to his credit -- he wouldn’t have been able to raise the money to take it to the next level.”

Schweizer, who directed Thomas Ades’ sexually provocative “Powder Her Face” for the company in 2001, remarks on how wildly different the material he’s worked on for Milenski has been, from an evening of operatic death scenes to the difficult 12-tone music of Hans Werner Henze’s “Elegy for Young Lovers.”

“Working with Michael is more like working with a European theater company,” Schweizer says. “The directorial concept will be, as a foregone conclusion, very strong, and make a challenging statement. Everything about the production -- the way it’s staged, choreographed, designed -- goes into providing a provocative scenario.... In American houses, it’s often presumed that the good director is discreet, lets the material ‘speak for itself.’ ”

“He’s a brinksman, someone who’s interested in living on the edge,” Alden says. “Whenever I’ve worked with him, he left me alone, which is a brave thing to do, because my work doesn’t always flatter or soothe an audience.”

Milenski insists that the current season feels no different from any of those that came before. One recent day, he received an inflatable blimp for a set and struggled with blowing it up, took ticket orders by phone, sorted out schedules for meetings, calmed a designer’s nerves and oversaw an audition for singers. He says he also spends some time in rehearsal every day “wringing my hands.”

Once he chooses a work and the stage director to adapt it, his main role, he says, is logistical.

“He’s not the kind of person who delegates authority,” Alden says. “He has to do things his way. It’s largely been a one-man operation for this quarter-century.”

In fact, Long Beach Opera’s repertory this season shows the impresario coming full circle. Three of the “Seven Short Operas” are by Darius Milhaud, the French modernist composer who was in residence nearby, at Mills College, while Milenski was working toward his doctorate at Berkeley.

Another of the short pieces (the madrigal cycle “Incenerite Spoglie”) is by Monteverdi, whom Milenski has been interested in his entire adult life.

And “La Perichole” is a piece Milenski worked on as a young stage manager in San Francisco and has wanted to put on in Long Beach for decades.

To serve as crew and cast members for his valedictory season, Milenski says, “I tried to bring together as many people as I could from the past. One of the things it shows is that Long Beach Opera is a company, is an association of artists, so many of us have worked together for years.”

He’s proud of working with artists from Southern California: He aims to make opera that catches the flavor of the region, that doesn’t seem like a European import. He’s come, in recent years, to see that as one of his most important contributions.

“With this season, there are a lot of loose ends tied up,” says Milenski. “It’s sort of -- what do you call it? -- ‘This Is Your Life.’ ”

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Troika will replace him

In the end, it will take three people to replace Milenski. Besides Mitisek, administrative assistant Christina Slenk has recently become administrator, and the company plans to hire a production manager next spring. Colleagues and observers can’t agree on what the future holds for the company.

“It’s an awfully difficult situation when you have a founder retire,” says Smith, the former Opera News editor. “Especially when the group’s remained small and hasn’t grown into a large institution. Here it’s so bound up in Milenski.”

“It would be devastating if the community let it stop happening,” Alden says. “The Long Beach Opera has always had a weirdly ambivalent relationship to its community. It’s never pandered or tried to build an audience in a conventional way. It would be a tragic thing if it ceased to exist.”

Mitisek, for his part, acknowledges the difficult economic climate.

“People say, ‘We don’t have any money.’ But the worst thing you can do on a rainy street with your car is hit the brakes.”

It will be hard to fill Milenski’s shoes, Schweizer acknowledges, but his strong personality could make the transition smoother.

“When someone’s point of view is that clear, and the sense of mission is so clear, it’s easier for someone to come on board. When it’s fuzzy, the next person has to reconceive. But that’s not going to happen. Andreas is another leader of the same school.”

As Milenski looks forward, he sees a mixed bag.

“I think the definition of what opera is has broadened enormously,” he says, praising the Los Angeles Opera’s eccentric staging last year of Bach’s Mass in B minor and recent offerings by San Francisco Opera, including works by Messiaen and Handel. “There’s certainly a lot more opera now than there was 20 years ago.”

He’s not worried about Long Beach’s ability to stay on the edge. He’s more concerned with the state of the arts.

“We’re definitely entering a period of difficulty for arts funding,” he says. “And I think we will suffer along with every other arts organization. It’s also a transitional period as the arts are forced to become more commercial. I’m a white European male, and I like fancy art. And I’m not interested in making art a business. But with arts funding, you really have to think of art as business.”

Milenski is vague about his plans. He will no longer teach at Long Beach State, and although music will always be important to him, he says, he’s not going to spend his free time soaking up opera or symphonic music.

His daughter, Isabel, is an opera director who’s been involved with the company and will continue to be, but such decisions as hiring are no longer his.

Milenski hints that he will travel and pursue an interest in regional theater, but he won’t go any further.

“This has been an enormous thing, and I’m not looking to replace it with another enormous thing,” he says. “I guess you could say I don’t have another mission. It’s a fairly consuming thing to produce a season of opera. I’m looking forward to a summer off -- not worrying about what to do the next year or where the money is going to come from.

“I suppose the only thing I think, from time to time, is, ‘How can I not do this?’ ”

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The general director plays favorites

“THE TURK IN ITALY,” GIOACCHINO ROSSINI, 1995: “Setting this piece in an American movie palace was perfect -- a place for romantic fantasy, here a handsome Turk arriving in Naples, or your town anywhere. It’s rare that we translate stuff quite that specifically. It was a wonderful convergence.”

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“EURIDICE,” JACOPO PERI, 2000: “The astounding thing about this piece was to discover that it was a great work of drama. Ordinarily when you look at early music you don’t see it as vibrant. We went into this thinking we were doing our part for the first opera. But it was a great show then and a great show now.”

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“EUROPERAS 3 & 4,” JOHN CAGE, 1993: “Who would’ve thought that John Cage was one of the 20th century’s great musical dramatists? We learned that Zen could be great drama. It’s about how small things can happen and be fascinating.”