Call it opera boffo

Thanks to the growth of Los Angeles Opera and regional opera companies, Southern California is turning into an opera center. But it has never before been a summer opera destination. This summer that will change, and in a remarkable way.

With L.A. Opera ending its season in June and beginning anew in early September, as well as the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra offering concert opera during the Bowl season, we’re already accustomed to big-ticket summer opera. Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” and “Idomeneo,” Puccini’s “Turandot,” Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” are this year’s standard repertory fare. There will be star sightings: Renee Fleming gets a Bowl night; Bryn Terfel will give an L.A. Opera recital.

But what is remarkable about this summer is that, in addition to all the standard stuff, there promises to be, scattered here and there, an informal festival of 20th century operas by famous composers -- famous, that is, for something other than these scores. The operas are obscure, rarely performed and of exceptional interest.

First off is “Die Kluge” by Carl “Carmina Burana” Orff, which Kent Nagano will conduct in concert at the Ojai Festival with forces from L.A. Opera. For its June season, Long Beach Opera, under new general director Andreas Mitisek, turns to “Maria de Buenos Aires” by tango great Astor Piazzolla and Richard Strauss’ “The Silent Woman.”

At the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the summer production will be “The Italian Straw Hat” by Nino Rota, best known for scoring many a Fellini flick, including “La Dolce Vita.” Southwest Chamber Music will present “Savitri,” a mystical opera by Gustav Holst, whose much more popular “The Planets” will make one of its frequent summer appearances at the Bowl. Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” is not officially an opera, but it is a daringly original piece of music theater, and seeing it staged at the Bowl should be an event.

Each of these works is characteristic of its composer but with a twist. Take “Die Kluge” (The Clever Woman). Based on a Grimms’ fairy tale about a buffoonishly brutal king and the peasant’s daughter who tames him, the opera vacillates between the sensual revelries of “Carmina Burana” and Orff’s more advanced serious music, such as that for his operas based on Greek tragedies.

It is interesting to think of Strauss’ “The Silent Woman” along with “Die Kluge.” Both are products of Germany during the Nazi years by composers who, though not party members, remained in Germany during the war and were favored by the Nazis. “Die Kluge” had its premiere in Frankfurt in 1943; “The Silent Woman” was first performed in Dresden eight years earlier. Its libretto was based on Ben Jonson’s “Epicoene” and written by Stefan Zweig. It is a slight comic opera, full of light music but also of Straussian invention, that was taken off the stage after only three performances and not heard again until 1959.

The reason for its initial lack of success was not just that it has none of the originality of, say, Strauss’ “Ariadne” but that Zweig was Jewish. Hitler and Goebbels, both Strauss fans, boycotted the premiere. But like “Die Kluge,” “The Silent Woman” was entirely without political context, other than being a diversion from terrible happenings. By coincidence, you will hear in it also references to a Kluge.

Rota’s “The Italian Straw Hat” is yet another wartime farce, though in this instance written in a post-Rossinian style and by a true anti-fascist. Completed in 1945, it wasn’t premiered until a decade later in Palermo and became one of the best-known scores that Rota neither wrote for film nor based on his film music. Well, not entirely. He does sneak in a quote from one of his film scores.

As for “Maria de Buenos Aires,” Piazzolla’s only opera, it too is what the Argentine composer and creator of the New Tango called a little opera. Little but not slight. You’ll know Piazzolla from the first seconds -- no one else wrote bandoneon music like that. Forget figuring out the plot about the Goblin who loves Maria, the personification of the tango. At one point, she attracts the collective eye of a chorus of gibberish-spouting psychoanalysts.

Bernstein’s “Mass,” a product of the early ‘70s, also contains a crackup and popular music. The crackup is of the hippie celebrant of the Mass, who -- in a manner Bernstein was eminently familiar with -- has to go to the limits, challenge God, in order to find himself. In Holst’s “Savitri,” from 1915, the attack is on Death, the opening character in this tale based on the Indian epic the Mahabarata. Satyavan outwits Death to save his wife, Savitri, in a score that has some of the glorious ecstasy of the finest, most mystical moments of “The Planets.”

These six operas represent a degree of operatic novelty that you will find simply nowhere else. You can travel across the country and happen upon Busoni’s “Doktor Faust” in San Francisco, John Adams’ “Nixon in China” in St. Louis, Shostakovich’s “The Nose” at Bard College in upstate New York. But no city in America -- or, for that matter, no festival in Europe -- will offer the equivalent of what has been planted to blossom during a dry, hot, smoggy Southern California summer. It may be a coincidence; it may not happen again. So pounce. And tell your friends in Salzburg and Edinburgh.

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The hot list

Carl Orff’s “Die Kluge,” L.A. Opera singers, Ojai Music Festival, Libbey Bowl, Ojai. June 4. $15-$70. (805) 646-2053.

Astor Piazzolla’s “Maria de Buenos Aires,” Long Beach Opera, Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach. June 12 and 19. $55-$110. (562) 439-2580.

Richard Strauss’ “The Silent Woman,” Long Beach Opera, Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach. June 13 and 19. $55-$110. (562) 439-2580.

Nino Rota’s “The Italian Straw Hat,” Music Academy of the West, Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St., Santa Barbara. Aug. 6 and 8. $35 and $55. (805) 969-8787.

Gustav Holst’s “Savitri,” Southwest Chamber Music, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Aug. 28-29. $25 and $35. (626) 685-4455.

Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” L.A. Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles. Aug. 19. $1-$40. (323) 850-2000.

Mark Swed, The Times’ classical music critic, can be reached at mark.swed@latimes.com.