Over its 22-year history, the Los Angeles Opera has acquired the reputation in some quarters of producing rare repertoire with dedication, while sometimes hewing to less exalted standards in central, "bread and butter" fare. No opera company should be forced to labour under such circumstances, but the weekend's two presentations added weight to the charge. The obscure felicitously dominated the familiar.

In music director James Conlon's continuing "Recovered Voices" project, the Los Angeles Opera is exploring a field mostly left untilled by other American companies. The conductor hopes to restore to the stage many of the German and Austrian composers suppressed by the Nazi regime in its quest to cleanse the Third Reich of "degenerate music". Some of those artists were Jewish and perished during the second world war; others fled their homeland and found their careers fatally curtailed. Conlon's mission is less humanitarian than it is artistic. The composers who fascinate him are the missing link in German music between Mahler and Schoenberg, the neglected musicians who, for the most part, resisted the siren call of atonality.