Review: A lonely feeling from Eotvos' opera 'Angels in America' Peter Eötvös had some things to say about his opera "Angels in America" during a public interview before the Los Angeles Philharmonic's New Music Group performed the work's West Coast premiere Tuesday in Walt Disney Concert Hall. Eötvös has written nine operas in various languages - French, German, Italian, Russian, English and even Japanese. Never, though, he said, has he tried to write in his native language, Hungarian. Bartók's one opera, "Bluebeard's Castle," looms too large. The composer is kidding himself. He based this 2004 opera on Tony Kushner's great American epic about the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York, and he's remained faithful, to a considerable fault, to both the original play's narrative and the poetry of Kushner's language. But he is utterly unfaithful to Kushner's irresistibly effusive and forthright context. Rather than American angels, Hungarian devils haunt the bleakly fascinating score. Bluebeard looks over everyone's shoulders. The libretto by Mari Mezei, Eötvös' wife, reduces a seven-hour play to about one-third that length and retains only 10% of the text (it feels like more). That's all it does. It doesn't, as opera can and maybe should, add language meant for music or open up avenues into the inner lives of characters, which is where opera loves to go. Song slows things down, and presumably to get as much plot development in as possible, Eötvös relies on spoken text as well as singing. But this is a true opera in the sense that it reshapes the theatrical experience of the work in a starkly foreign way. One of Kushner's great achievements was his ability two decades ago to connect a wide audience with what still seemed, to much of the mainstream, outsiders. He played brilliantly with stereotypes in the gay and straight communities, be they drag queens, Mormons or the impossible contradictions of Roy Cohn (McCarthyite, Jewish, predatory closeted gay, ruthlessly corrupt Reaganite). It takes a plague, angels, history, the boiling pot of New York and exceedingly generous sentiment to make this work. But where Kushner shows that we are all in this together, Eötvös keeps us apart, zeroing in on the loneliness. The plot is so condensed that it would probably be best not to treat it as narrative. The alienated voices are isolated cries in the dark. In the end, not even Kushner's angels are good company. We die alone. The L.A. Phil performance was a mixed bag. It was carefully conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado but staged conventionally and ineffectively by David Gately. The cast was restricted to a platform behind the orchestra and amplified. A hospital bed, a desk and the like were wheeled in and out. Occasional lighting effects by Azra King-Abadi, such as raising the house lights when an angel entered the room, helped slightly. But there was no theatrical intimacy. Eight singers assumed more than 20 roles, shifting dizzyingly fast. The long first part, "Millennium Approaches," is treated as operatic exposition. Eötvös' vocal lines are unfussy. The chamber ensemble is used to create an ever-changing sea of sound and can be musically fascinating if not always dramatic. REVIEW: Composer and conductor Peter Eötvös' "Fierce Beauty" But in the dull Disney Hall setting, the show finally came to life with the rapturous appearance of soprano Measha Brueggergosman's Angel at the beginning of "Perestroika," the second part. The veteran soprano Julia Migenes was an odd choice for the frustrated young Mormon wife, Harper, but an inspired one for the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who torments the dying Roy Cohn. Janice Hall proved a great character actress in her four roles, which included that of an old rabbi and Cohn's doctor. The countertenor Brian Asawa was sympathetic as flamboyant black nurse, Belize, and as a homeless woman. In the central roles, David Adam Moore's Prior Walter, the AIDS victim whose dying frames the work, came into his own but it took most of the opera for him to do so. Jonas Olofsson was not convincing as his neurotic Jewish lover, Louis. Nikolas Nackley, as the Mormon Joseph Pitt who comes out, had the excuse of being a last minute replacement for a foreign singer who couldn't get a visa in time. The L.A. Phil New Music Group, though, was superb. A long, difficult score was mastered in a short time. The performance included new revisions in the orchestration by Eötvös, who has replaced synthesizer effects with equivalent ones from amplified celesta, Hammond organ and electric guitar. These wind up sounding like the Hungarian cimbalom and now make this "Angels" feel more Bartókian than ever. And that proved the evening's great revelation. If Eötvös' "Angels" is ultimately a study in alienation, then Prior is perhaps really Bartók, who died in America, neglected, uncomforted, alone.