James Conlon begins his final stretch as L.A. Opera music director

James Conlon has begun his long goodbye as music director of Los Angeles Opera, and he does so by boasting big numbers. Twenty seasons with the company (half its history). More than 500 performances of 70 different operas at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and occasional neighboring venues, such as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. But only 10 of the operas have been comedies. The life of a music director at a major opera company is inevitably one engaged in tragedy, and Conlon exhibits the dramatic flair to grip its emotional immensity.

Yet he is exiting by showing that, when it all comes down to it, he prefers laughter to tears.

The two main stage actual operas he leads in his final season (the other was “West Side Story”) happen to be the most sublime and insightful comic operas to have ever reached the lyric stage. They are works that don’t just make you feel good but make the world feel good. One, Verdi’s “Falstaff,” is currently at the Chandler, and that will be followed in May and June by Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

Friday night, Conlon further upped the comedic element in a gala farewell concert at the Pavilion that included extended excerpts from two more comic operas that most illumine the human condition: Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.”

All four of these so-called comic operas go far beyond genre. Sunday’s performance of “Falstaff” was followed by a talk between Conlon and British actor, writer and startling wit, Stephen Fry. In a rollicking monologue, Fry described all opera as comedy, tragedy merely being the result of idiotic egos incapable of levity. He gave the example of Iago in Verdi’s “Otello.” Had Otello understood that all the world is a joke, as Falstaff startlingly reveals at the end of the opera, Iago would never have been able to poison Otello’s susceptible frail ego with his ridiculous tales of handkerchiefs and what-not. Rulers are, of course, like that.

“Falstaff” is an obvious choice for one of Conlon’s farewell operas — farewell but leaving with the title conductor laureate and the promise for regular returns. It was the opera that helped him at 14 fall in love with the art form and the first opera he conducted professionally a half-century ago. It has been with him all his life, and it is a conductor’s opera — complex, fleeting, sylvan, changeable, tender and tough. Conlon has lived with it his whole operatic life and makes it live in performance. The production is a revival of the disappointingly fussy, clumsy, old-fashioned one by Lee Blakeley the company unveiled in 2013 for Conlon and to celebrate the Verdi bicentennial. Falstaff is shown as a dissolute, deluded, drunken buffoon, the only advantage of that crudity is that it by a small miracle he turns lovable.

It looks no better now, but the cast is even finer, with Craig Colclough as an exceptionally characterful Falstaff, spritely stage play (Shawna Lucey directs the revival), a consistently winning cast, a glowing orchestra (which includes the first performances with its new concertmaster, Alyssa Park) and Conlon conducting not so much like his life depends on it (that was the old days) but as a wise embrace that all life is a joke.

“Falstaff” can be seen as a corrective in opera. Those merry scheming wives of Windsor further debasing the lecherous, if harmless, old “Falstaff” — they could just as easily ignore his ludicrous missives but instead use him to get back at the more troublesome scheming jealous men who attempt to control their lives.

But when not asked to clown too much, Nicole Heaston (Alice), Sarah Saturnino (Meg), Hyona Kim (Mistress Quickly) and Deanna Breiwick (Nannetta) reveal seductive powers and Breiwick brings Fairy Queen magical lyricism to the final scene. Anthony León is her lyrical tenor fiancé, Ernesto Petti Meg’s lordly loutish jealous husband and Nathan Bowles the loutish Dr. Caius. Hyungjin Son and Vinicius Costa filled out the cast as Falstaff’s bumpkinly servants.

Deanna Breiwick as Nannetta in L.A. Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Falstaff.”

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Most of the cast took part in the gala along with the Los Angeles Opera Chorus, and the conductor used his lovefest to show what we missed in “The Conlon Era.” He had advocated for Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” one of the two mature Verdi operas the company never staged (“Le Vespri Siciliani” is the lamented other) and Wagner’s “Meistersinger.”

Though tragic “Forza,” from which were excerpts from the third and fourth acts, constituted the first half of the program. After intermission came the Act 2 finale of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” (which Conlon has memorably conducted at L.A. Opera) and excerpts from the end of “Meistersinger.” The theme seemed be redemption, showing, just as Fry had suggested, that while it serves tragedy, it works especially well in comedy.

“Forza” is not neglected, but it is often overlooked. The libretto is cumbersome although full of dramatic promise and surprise and with a comic episode that prefigures “Falstaff.”

Conlon here did the redeeming with special help from tenor Rodrick Dixon, who had served the conductor well in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and Conlon’s revival of Alexander Zemlinsky’s powerful “The Dwarf,” part of the conductor’s Recovered Voices project to rediscover operas banned by Nazi Germany and then forgotten.

Mozart turns redemption into transcendence in “Figaro,” as a jealous yet philandering count finds his soul. That doesn’t happen until Act 4, but at the earlier finale, full of tomfoolery, the stage is well set for depth in a way not dissimilar to “Falstaff.” Here Hyungjin Son, the bumpkin-ish Bardolph in “Falstaff,” portrayed the Count, while Colclough was the wily Figaro.

“Meistersinger” has been on L.A. Opera’s wish list since practically the beginning. The young company had promised to mount it in the early 1990s, but it proved too expensive during an L.A. recession. With the help of baritone Martin Gantner as Hans Sachs — the cobbler and mastersinger who comes to grips with a changing world and art form — the magnificence of Wagner’s only mature comedy may make it hard for the company to ignore it much longer, no matter how budget-busting.

Among video tributes to Conlon from singers, musicians, board members, politicians and administration officials, there was the surprise appearance of Placido Domingo. It was impossible to make out what the famed and once adored tenor said, so loud the applause at seeing him for the first time since he resigned from the company because of allegations of sexual harassment.

He was crucial in the creation of the company. He sang in and conducted countless performances. He raised millions of dollars to keep the lights on. He ran the company for several years. He hired Conlon.

Whether the cheers for Domingo will translate into redemption remain to be seen. But one of Conlon’s parting gifts to L.A. is an irrefutable argument that no art form does redemption quite like opera.