Modernism Runs Amok in Long Beach : Opera: Michael Milenski’s imaginative company opens season with strange pairing of ‘Dido and Aeneas’ and ‘Riders to the Sea.’

In many ways, the Long Beach Opera is our most interesting opera company. Michael Milenski’s brave little band may teeter in perpetuo on the brink of financial disaster, but it thrives on thinking big, paying little and always taking chances. There are no easy problems here, and certainly no easy solutions.

The product may look odd at times and sound odder, but it is never boring. Not many operatic organizations can make that claim.

On a good day, Long Beach deals in revelations. Opera is treated as valid musical theater. Masterpieces--well-known, long-neglected or virtually unknown--are subjected to the healthy, probing light of iconoclastic reinterpretation.

On a bad day, Long Beach gets its opera mired in trendy-modern gobbledygook.

Sunday, alas, was a bad day.

To open the all-too brief 1994-95 season at the Center Theater, in conjunction with the UK/LA Festival, Milenski chose a pair of strange billfellows: Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” written in 1689, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Riders to the Sea,” written in 1937.

Both are British. Both are short. Both require a modest performing apparatus. Beyond that, the two have little in common.

“Dido” deals in deathless antiquity and tells its tale with Baroque compression. “Riders to the Sea” dabbles in slice-of-life realism and speaks in the suppressed tones of a romanticism in decay.

The differences certainly do not preclude compatible pairing. Opposites can be attractive. The Long Beach forces, unfortunately, did a lot of stressful straining to impose a unified vision on Purcell and Vaughan Williams and came up in the middle of a stylistic muddle.

In a classic fit of fuzzy thinking, the dancerly director Tanya Blood Hinkel and her clever designer Adam Silverman decided to play both operas in the same sprawling sandbox. Get it? Footprints in the sands of time, and all that.

The cliche parade was lengthy. It began with a distracting gaggle of barefoot dancers, drafted to spook the central playing area as well as the aisles for both works. Acting was out. Picturesque posing was in. So, incidentally, was view-blocking for the unfortunate members of the audience trapped in seats behind the human statues.

The same hard-working, seemingly under-rehearsed cast was enlisted for each opus. Symbolism was generously applied throughout (Dido got herself wrapped into and out of an endless crimson sheet, apparently to signal crisis and/or catharsis). The orchestra became part of the set. Sliding panels defined changing locales upstage, creakily.

It all was supposed to be fraught with meaning. Deep meaning. It ended up being just plain pretentious and fussy. Also silly.

The period conventions of “Dido” resisted updated abstraction. The stark intimacy of “Riders to the Sea” resisted decorative clutter. More, in these cases, ended up being too much.

What was Dido, tragic Queen of Virgil’s Carthage, doing at the beach? What was Maurya, mournful matriarch of Synge’s Irish fishing village, doing at the beach? Beats us.

The pervasive theatrical obfuscation could have been mitigated, to a degree, by musical brilliance. No such luck. The music-making was hardly brilliant.

Roderick Shaw conducted a scrappy little ensemble from the harpsichord for a rough and unready approximation of Purcell’s glorious score. Cohesion was hampered beyond his control, moreover, by a staging scheme that kept the characters wandering, and the chorus splintered, at awkward distances. He stirred the dreary sonic soup dutifully on behalf of Vaughan Williams without sustaining much dynamic variety or dramatic tension.

The “Dido” cast was properly dominated by Janice Felty--willowy, sensitive and poised in the title role. Ask not why she had to double as the Sorceress, or, for that matter, why Belinda’s music was divided between two pretty-piping sopranos, Suzan Hanson and KristiPeterson (neither of whom seemed to be singing in English). James Demler served as a stoic, prosaic Aeneas.

In “Riders,” Felty returned as a rather youthful Maurya, the old widow who loses all her sons to the sea. Now taut and tough, she refocused her energies wisely, though her lyric mezzo-soprano threatened to evaporate in lines specifically intended for a contralto. The others performed as sympathetically as conditions would allow.

* Center Theater , Long Beach Performing Arts Center , Wednesday and Friday, 8 p.m. Information: (310) 596-5556.