So I've Heard

Anytime you get the premonition that civilization might be doomed, you need no
firmer assurance of survival that the Saturday night series of concerts at the
J. Paul Getty Museum. You can’t get in, of course; the series is always sold
out. But it helps just to know it’s there: civilized, highly imaginative
programs presented in the most civilized setting.
Saturday’s program was the collaboration of two of UCLA’s blithe spirits, the
musical scholar Robert Winter and the theatrical director John Hall, who
between them concocted a replica of an 18th-century London musical and
dramatic entertainment. The framework, as conceived by Hall, consisted of a
confrontation between a troupe of hoity-toity Italian opera singers and some
English comedians. They squabble as to whose is the higher art and then, in
the manner of Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” they reconcile their
difference and put on their combined show.
The idea was genial, but what made it work was the high quality of the music
— a pastiche of songs and arias by popular composers of the time, including
Thomas Arne, George Friedrich Handel and Stephen Storace — and the level of
performance. All six singers — sopranos Laura Freeze, Frances Young and Shawn
Daywalt; countertenor Brian Asawa, tenor Dale Trecy and baritone Jeff Calof —
are active in opera workshops in and around Los Angeles — and all were first
rate. Young Asawa, 23 and still finishing his studies at U.S.C., sang his
stratospheric roulades with a marvelous ease and purity of style; he is
someone to watch.
The music was mostly unfamiliar and included some delightful rareties: songs
and ensembles from a 1794 opera by Stephen Storace called “The Cherokee,”
whetting the appetite for a complete performance; a ravishing trio from
Handel’s “Imeneo” and, as an encore, Thomas Arne’s original operatic setting
of “Rule, Britannia.”
It was, then, a captivating idea for a concert, and brilliantly brought off,
with surprise and delight around every turn. Robert Winter officiated at the
harpsichord. The evening’s damp air did raise some havoc with the fragile old-
style instruments of Greg Maldonado’s Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra; the group
has sounded better-tuned on other occasions. Oh well, a small price to pay for
an evening of treasures beyond price.
There’s one concert left in this summer’s series, on August 25, sold-out as
usual. Maybe if you sneaked in a couple of days before, and hid behind the Van
Gogh…

Perfection in the arts comes in many shapes and sizes. Nobody could mistake the grand, humanitarian strokes in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” for the glistening, small-scale artifice of Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”; each are perfect comic operas in the elegance of their design, and in the way each work accomplishes what it set out to do, so masterfully, with such originality. “Don Pasquale” is a perfect small comedy, and the classic 1933 recording, newly issued on the MM (Music Memoria) label, brings it perfectly to life. The plot couldn’t be simpler: the old operatic warhorse, many times ridden, about the foolish old man, his infatuation with a young girl, and his comeuppance engineered by the girl and her allies. The wonder of Donizetti’s small comic masterpiece lies in its swift and unflagging pace. He doesn’t waste a note. The opera runs considerably under two hours, and its pace is breathtaking — literally so at times, since it is, among other things, a singer’s paradise. The solo pieces, especially the arias for the not-all-that-bright hero Ernesto, are ravishing, but the ensemble writing is even more brilliant. There is a comic duet for the foolish old Pasquale and his sidekick, Dr. Malatesta (= “Headache”) that is just about as funny as anything in opera, but it is also a marvel of musical construction: first one singer in a tongue-twisting rapid patter, then the other, then both together, with the orchestra all the while carrying on in high hilarity with a tune of its own. When you come to this point on the recording (side 2 band 5) you will surely want to repeat it, and repeat it again; the nice thing about compact-disk technology is the way you can do this simply by pushing the right button. The Ernesto in this ancient, but thoroughly clear, recording is the great Italian lyric tenor Tito Schipa; this was the only complete operatic recording he made during his long and memorable career. Ernesto Badini is the Pasquale; the Malatesta is Afro Poli: two first-class burlesque comedians whose marvelous sense of timing, of give-and-take, is an art virtually vanished from operatic stages today. Norina, the heroine, is Adelaide Saraceni, a little shrill at times, less good only when measured against the high quality of the rest of the cast. Carlo Sabajno conducts, a solid, workhorse conductor much used in the early days of operatic recording.It is of course Schipa, above all, who will sell this remarkable recording, that wonderfully suave, beautifully modulated singer who had the intelligence throughout his long career to recognize what he could do the best and, more important, to shun what he could not do. Against the supertenor heroes of his time, from Enrico Caruso through to Beniamino Gigli and Giovanni Martinelli, Schipa was a lightweight: a Mozart singer, a perfect exponent of the bel-canto repertory, a superfine Alfredo in “La Traviata.” Generations later, Luciano Pavarotti could have become the Schipa of our day, had he not been lured into the more strenuous repertory that dulled that marvelous bloom his voice once had. But this reissue of “Don Pasquale” isn’t meant to deplore what might have been, but to celebrate what was. Among the many welcome reissues of valuable performances from the first years of complete-opera recordings (including a wealth of Gigli material now reissued on Angel-EMI) this two-disk set looms large. There’s enough room on the second disk to include a ravishing selection of Schipa singles, some of them duets with Amelita Galli-Curci and — although uncredited on the labeling — Toti dal Monte. The record comes without libretto and with only the most meagre plot summary, but the music — and the way it is sung — tells its own story.LINE SPACE The fear, at the dawn of the digital era, that the new technology would relegate the great repertory of the past to the back shelves of collectors’ shops, has proven groundless. CD reissues like the “Don Pasquale,” along with disk after disk of solo records by the greatest of the bygone artists, have become profitable on the major labels and the smaller ones as well. Sure, there is gold in the Pavarotti market, but who could have predicted the hot competition now going on in the Caruso department? Hot on the heels of its Toscanini reissues, RCA has announced a Caruso promotion, with the legendary tenor’s entire repertory on that label (his major outlet during the two-dozen years of his recording career) to be reissued in a CD set this fall. Another label, Germany’s Bayer (unrelated to the aspirin people) also has a “complete” Caruso set on the way, and meanwhile there have been Caruso singles on other labels, including Pearl, Club 99, Pair and Nimbus. The overlap in actual repertory has, of course, been widespread.Has it been worth the effort? Of course it has; you need only a few notes from any vintage Caruso performance to fill in with actual sound all the raving accounts about the beauty of his voice, the versatility of his repertory, the radiant splendor of his phrasing. Sure, there are extravagances here that are somewhat out of step with today’s passion for historically accurate performance practices. It’s a safe bet, however, that if a tenor showed up today sounding like Caruso he, too, would be allowed the liberties that Caruso assumed as his nature-endowed right.Still dubious? Start with the “O paradiso” from Meyerbeer’s “L’Africana” (currently on RCA’s “Enrico Caruso, 21 Favorite Arias” and on the Nimbus disk simply labeled “Caruso”). Sure the aria is sung in Italian instead of the proper French; sure Caruso milks the pianissimos and overshades the climaxes of many phrases. But sure, too, is the stature of this record as a study in suave, seductive singing of a quality that has vanished from this world.The Caruso reissues have been created along two divergent philosophies. The RCA series employs the digital re-engineering techniques developed by Thomas Stockham and known as the Stockham/Soundsteam Computer Process which, without getting into abstruse technology, digitally reconstitutes everything that was on the original disks, and then does away with such unwanted elements as surface scratch and the occasional blasting from notes that strained the resources of the acoustic-horn recording studio. Most other releases, including Nimbus Records’ fancily-named “Prima Voce Natural Ambisonic Transfer Technology” sticks more closely to the original product, scratch and all, assuming that the consumer can twiddle his own knobs to improve the sound.There are solid arguments for and against both systems. The RCA system, as heard on Caruso disks already issued, creates a creamy-sounding product, with scratch remarkably suppressed. But there is no escaping the fact that the sound is an electronic product; something of the impact of that charismatic singer in an ancient Victor Talking Machine Corporation studio, letting fly at a primitive acoustic-horn recorder with the blaze of his incomparable artistry, seems unnecessarily tamed by all this new technology. With all the surface noise and other defects of their time, the undoctored Caruso, as on the recent Nimbus reissues, retains its dazzle.The art of recording great music, after all, started from scratch. Perhaps it should stay that way.

There is a certain shock value in hearing the music of the distant past, as
there often is with music of today. Our most familiar repertory stems from a
time (Bach, say, through Debussy) when certain stated or implied rules
governed such musical matters as harmony and structure. Anything composed
before those rules, or after they had worn out their welcome, can put the
timid listener to flight.Nobody actually tried to flee the wonderful concert at the Getty Museum on
Saturday night. The fact that the music was all half a millennium old
conferred on the performers — the Early Music Ensemble of San Diego and the
lutenist Michael Eagan — an aura of antiquarian respectability. Even so, it
turned out to be a night full strange, daring sounds.
It was a time and place, the court of Burgundy late in the 15th century, when
all the arts seemed swept by a passion for change. In painting, the Van Eyck
brothers experimented with perspective; in music the composers Guillaume Dufay
and Gilles Binchois dabbled in new harmonic colorations — in something as
natural to today’s ears as the triad, which was at that time denounced by
cultural leaders as a dissonance. In a fantastically colorful motet, Dufay’s
“Flos florum,” sung by the San Diegans on Saturday, a vulnerable listener
might well have expected the handsomely decorated walls of the Getty’s Inner
Peristyle Garden to collapse from the weight of those twisted melodic lines
with their raw, tortured harmonies.It was, therefore, a concert both new and old: a program in which,
paradoxically, the opening set of short religious works seemed the livelier,
and the later series of lovesongs seemed like one slow, lovelorn lament after
another — all, of course, hauntingly beautiful.The five-member San Diegan ensemble has worked as an early-music group since
1972. Their voices did not come across as super-suave, in the manner of all
those British ensembles that have come to town recently. Their forte is the
splendid sense of ensemble, the give-and-take that even seems willing to
admit that some of this music is actually rather comic, and is meant to
be.At intermission, to add to the music’s impact, there was the chance to wander
through the museum, to marvel at the million-dollar shadows on the shiny
surface of Van Gogh’s “Irises” and, even better, to take in the splendid
illustrated manuscript of “The Visions of Tondal,” dating from the same time
and place as the music, and reflecting the same wild grotesqueries as in the
music downstairs. This was the first in the Getty’s fifth annual biweekly concert series, devoted
this year to the historic music of five European cultural centers (next time,
Florence). It has become a hot ticket; this summer’s series is already sold
out, and deservedly so.

Elsewhere the drought took its toll, but the UCLA campus has been richly awash these last four days — inundated, that is, with magical Mozart, much of it unfamiliar, all of it beautifully done. Perhaps the limitations suggested by the title “Baroque Mozart” were not strictly observed in this third biennial E. Nakamichi Festival, but so what? Mozart’s genius belongs to all ages; it spills beyond the historians’ attempts to cram it into a single stylistic period. Friday night’s Royce Hall concert proved this point triumphantly. The shadows of Mozart’s musical ancestors fell across the evening’s big choral work, a C- major Mass (No. 337 in Koechel’s chronological listing) full of the rousing glories that Mozart might (or might not) have gleaned from Handel, and very Baroque indeed in the “Benedictus” section that starts off in a Handelian, fugal manner and moves with Handelian ease into its exultant Hosannas. But the program also included the evidence of Mozart’s uncanny prophesies of musical styles to come: in the rhapsodic meanderings in the slow movement of the G-major Piano Concerto (K. 453) and, indeed, in the way that whole miraculous work seems like a conversation about romantic, personal emotions. Again, as at earlier concerts last week, the visiting Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra from San Francisco, with its marvelously rich-sounding (if sometimes treacherous) instruments modeled on those of Mozart’s time, filled Royce Hall with sounds most mellow and grand. Even the seating of the players was authentically Mozartian, to allow for a dramatic give and take between, say, first violins on one side and seconds on the other, or between trumpets and trombones widely separated. Malcolm Bilson was the soloist in the concerto, hampered somewhat by a rather drab-sounding early-style piano, but still finely sensitive to the way Mozart’s miraculous scoring merges the solo instrument into his iridescent orchestration. The chorus in the Mass (and in a remarkable single “Kyrie,” K. 341) was that fine local group, I Cantori, not heard around here nearly often enough; the solo quartet included the radiant soprano Judith Nelson. Neal Stulberg conducted, replacing the orchestra’s own Nicholas McGegan who was obliged to honor European commitments this week. Stulberg, remembered hereabouts as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s assistant conductor in the Giulini days, now has Albuquerque’s New Mexico Symphony as home base. His work this week has been that of a poised, insightful, communicative musician; this “rediscovery” has proven one of the festival’s most festive byproducts. Alongside the evening events, the Nakamichi program offered a full bill of daytime concerts: Haydn and Mozart by Judith Nelson with Bilson at the same early-style piano, a solo Bilson recital, a fascinating concert by UCLA’s Thomas Harmon on the university’s splendid Baroque organ, and some fine- grained playing by Gregory Maldonado’s Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra. It all made for a busy four days, full of rewards and, with the Mozart bicentennial due upon us next year, an enticing foretaste of things to come.

Just before the happy end of “Happy End,” the 1929 Bert Brecht/Kurt Weill
musical that began a five week run at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory on
Friday night — the ringleader of the bandit gang delivers a ringing speech.
Robbing a bank, she (yes, she) proclaims, is nowhere near as great a sin as
owning one. Since the mostly marvelous production at South Coast has been
underwritten by the “honorary producer,” the First Interstate Bank, it’s
clear that Orange County contains more liberal spirits than are usually
credited.
Not, of course, that these ringleader’s sentiments or anything else in this
hugely amusing (and hugely messy) dramatic farrago is to be taken at face
value. Barbara Damashek’s sizzling, whizzing staging, and her superior cast of
ruby-throated comedians who carry it out, forestall such a possibility.
Brecht himself publicly disowned the playscript, yet his thumbprints are all
over: the setting among Chicago gangsters and Salvation Army lassies, which he
returned to in other plays, the cynical doubletalk, the inane satire of the
“happy end.” Michael Feingold’s English text is more a version than merely a
translation; common sense lurks somewhere just out of reach. (By the way, the
Damon Runyon story that became “Guys and Dolls,” which Brecht’s story most
resembles, was as yet unwritten at the time of “Happy End.”)
But Brecht at least acknowledged his lyrics, and these were what drew out of
Kurt Weill a torrent of music that ranks among the best theater songs of his or
anyone else’s time. When Patricia Ben Peterson pins the audience to its
collective seats with her searing “Surabaya Johnny,” the song that is the
exact orchestration of heartbreak; when the gang of thugs go all to pieces with
their nostalgia for “Bill’s beerhall in Bilbao”; or when thugs and
salvationists join forces for the hilarious sendup known as “The Liquor
Dealer’s Dream,” you know you’re being had and you willingly give in.
It’s a splendid production all told. Oh, perhaps Christopher Allport could lose
some of his stiffening as the romantic lead; perhaps Ron Boussom, as the
insidious “Dr. Nakamura” could keep his Japanese accent from veering off into
middle-high German. Perhaps…
Never mind. Peterson’s Lillian is mostly glorious. Among the thugs there’s the
marvelous solo turns by Robert Machray and Jerome Butler; as the uptight
Salvationist major Jane A. Johnston is a starchy delight. Ralph Funicello’s
stage design, including an oversized Industrial-Revolution engine to drive a
mere nickelodeon, is its own catalog of wonders. “Happy End” is eminently
worth your while; you’ll be happy long before the end.
THE FACTS
What: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Happy End”
Were: South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
When: 8 p.m., Tuesday-Friday; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.,
Sunday, thru July 13.
Behind the scenes: staged by Barbara Damashek, musical direction by Dennis
Castellano; designed by Ralph Funicello.
Starring: Patricia Ben Peterson, Christopher Allport and Ron Boussom.
Tickets: $27-$34; for reservations phone 714 957-4033.

By general agreement, “The Girl of the Golden West” is Puccini’s problem
opera. Maybe so, but the Music Center Opera’s new production, unveiled
Wednesday night in an out-of-town tryout at the Orange County Performing Arts
Center in Costa Mesa, presents a whole string of problem-solvings, most of them
brilliant.
The problems are basic, the principal one being the notion of a romantic
Italian opera drawn from David Belasco’s sweet but primitive melodrama set
among bandits and miners during the California gold rush. “Whiskey per
tutti,” someone sings; “Doo-da, Doo-da” sings the chorus, and the audience
inevitably snickers. (And so the audience did on Wednesday night.) Another
problem probably escaped Belasco’s notice: the idea of a spinster of uncertain
age, virginal house-mother to a horde of thirsty miners, suddenly turned to
amorous mush by the first bandit to challenge her resistance.
Harold Prince’s production, introduced at the Chicago Lyric Opera and now here
on loan, gets around that latter problem most effectively, by pretending it
doesn’t exist. Under Prince’s guidance Gwyneth Jones’ Minnie is, quite simply,
a study in pre-menopausal repression that Tennessee Williams might have
recognized, ready to snap her hinges at the very sight of the equally middle-
aged, portly Placido Domingo, who apparently fell into banditry only because
his daddy bequeathed him his old gang.
Making no attempt at being believable, and singing away with the blazing lung-
power that Puccini’s shaggy score demands, these two superstars become the
pillars of an evening of mostly thrilling opera. It matters in no way that
there isn’t a single moment that inspires belief. It’s all pure hokum on a
level so high that you could almost mistake it for art.
It’s a handsome production, at that, with its gold-rush rusticity and its
snowflakes falling prettily — straight down despite the howling of the wind
machine. The hand of Harold Prince shows in the prevailing sense of too much of
everything: extra people-props, a set with cabins and teepees whirling around
on turntables like so many spinning tops and, in the last act, a towering
railroad scaffolding to serve as the bandit’s gallows. (On the other hand, the
customary horses have given way to a single railway handcar.)
Justino Diaz is a fine, sturdy “Sceriffo” (sheriff, to you); Michael Gallup
is his usual solid self as Sonora. Even in the questionable acoustic
surroundings at Costa Mesa, and even under Richard Buckley’s lethargic time-
beating, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra provided a suitable backdrop.
Another performance remains in Costa Mesa, Saturday at 8 p.m.; the opera
reopens at its home base in the Music Center on Wednesday, June 12 for the
first of five performances, with Carol Neblett replacing Gwyneth Jones in the
last two.
THE FACTSD
What: The Music Center Opera production of Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden
West.”
Where & When: Orange County Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m. Saturday; Los
Angeles Music Center at 8 p.m. June 12, 15, 18 and 21, 2 p.m. June 23.
Starring: Placido Domingo and Gwyneth Jones, with Carol Neblett replacing Jones
on June 21 and 23.
Behind the scenes: Directed by Harold Prince; conducted by Richard Buckley;
designed by Eugene and Franne {cq} Lee.
Tickets:
20 to $80; for information phone 714 556-ARTS for the Orange County
performance; 213 972-7211 for Los Angeles.

Even before Francesca Zambello arrived at the appointed hour, expectations had been shaped by memories of another hugely talented, innovative, ferociously energetic operatic stage director of our time. You can’t help it.

It was Boston’s Sarah Caldwell, after all, who did the first American staging of Serge Prokofiev’s titanic “War and Peace” (which Zambello staged in Seattle last year). It was Caldwell who staged America’s first encounter with Hector Berlioz’s “The Trojans” (which Zambello will stage for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera this coming Saturday). After that, Zambello flies off to Geneva to stage yet another Berlioz opera, “Benvenuto Cellini.” Caldwell had put that opera on once, too.

Zambello arrived, and the resemblance was further confirmed. No, she hasn’t even come close to Caldwell’s famous girth that sometimes made for an unkind remark or two. But there’s a lot of Zambello even so, and when she speaks it’s with Caldwell’s forward-thrusting, dynamic, bronze-colored alto, and, of course, with the same sense that she knows exactly where she’s going and how to get there. If we’re lucky, history will repeat itself, Zambello in for Caldwell.

Born in New York to an American mother and an Italian father, both actor/singers, she got her degree (in philosophy) at Colgate University and launched her operatic career as assistant to yet another in the pantheon of innovative stage directors, the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, a man governed by the philosophy that anytime you don’t like what the composer tells you to do, do something else.

She’s come a long way; who, outside of Milwaukee, knew her name six years ago? That’s where she did her first important professional work, starting in her mid-20s as co-director of that city’s Skylight Opera Theater. Her partner there was Stephen Wadsworth, best known as the librettist for Leonard Bernstein’s unfortunate fling into grand opera known as “A Quiet Place.” They have now gone their separate ways, but Zambello pinpointed the Milwaukee experience as the best kind of training for a stage director with innovative ideas.

”It’s a small theater, 300 seats and only a chamber-orchestra pit,” she said. “But we accomplished a lot there, eight productions a year, 15 or 20 performances of each. It became a sort of laboratory, where you learned to focus on intimate performance details, on acting rather than just belting out high notes.

”Actually,” she continued, “I like to balance large and small productions, and sometimes they even intermix.” She talked about her now-famous production of Puccini’s “Tosca” in London last season, not at an opera house but in a sports arena at Earls Court, seating 10,000. “Sure, it had to be big. We put the production in the center of the arena, with a set that looked like the whole city of Rome, with 10 horses and 20 dogs. When the shepherd sang in the last act, instead of being offstage as the libretto demanded, he came on with a flock of sheep.”

Still, according to the star of that production, Los Angeles resident Julia Migenes, the great thing about Zambello’s concept was the intimacy it provided. “Instead of having to sing XI Love You’ to the second balcony,” Migenes remembered during a recent conversation, “the microphones made it possible to sing it to the tenor.”

Zambello also spoke with good feelings about her most recent gig, the American premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s “Oedipus” at the Santa Fe Opera, where she was working for the first time. Here was innovative opera at its most resolute, and it demanded innovative staging: singers on the opera house’s topmost towers (in, as it happened, howling rainstorms at all four performances), one onstage singer simulating (awesomely) suicide by hanging, all manner of amplification tricks. The critics (present company excepted) hated it; Zambello, she claimed, had a ball.

”That’s my kind of opera house: no stars, heavy emphasis on ensemble, 4 weeks of rehearsal. Sure, the critics jumped all over it, and that’s a real tragedy nowadays. We don’t have enough critics who love opera, really love it I mean.”

Will the critics love the 4-1/2-hour expanse of Berlioz’ “The Trojans”? Nobody is saying, yet; the least everybody is saying is that our local company is brave beyond belief in even attempting to cope with it. But that’s Peter Hemmings’ doing; after all, it was his Scottish Opera’s production in the 1960s that restored the long-neglected score in its full glory to world attention. When Hemmings took over the Los Angeles Music Center Opera six years ago, he made no secret of the fact that a revival of “The Trojans” was his fondest hope.

Zambello feels that the recent popularity of Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” that 17-hour epic beside which any other opera (even “The Trojans”) is no longer than a sneeze, cuts through any resistance to modern full-length productions. This “Trojans,” she poined out with pride, is even longer than previous “complete” performances. “There’s an 8-minute scene, early on, where the Greek double agent Sinon tries to convince the Trojan King Priam to accept the Greeks’ gift of the famous Wooden Horse. Berlioz never finished the orchestration of that scene, so it’s never been done. Now it has been completed, by the Berlioz scholar Hugh MacDonald, and this will be its American premiere.

” XThe Trojans’ really is the French XRing,’ ” Zambello said. “It doesn’t only tell the story of the fall of Troy and the love of Dido and Aeneas; it frames all this, as Wagner framed his gods and goddesses, with a text of even higher significance. I’ve tried to bring this out in this production.

“As in Wagner, I have the ancient gods standing around the stage, overseeing the action of the mortals. I see Troy as a dead culture, its beaten warriors mourning that demise, the whole thing set in dark colors and black.

“But Carthage is different, and here we’ve brought the action up to Berlioz’ own time, and with lighter, brighter colors. After all, Carthage is only 7 years old when the Trojans land there. The city is still being built; there’s scaffolding all around. And it’s being built as a Utopian society, Marxist, Hegelian. But now Aeneas comes along and the whole plan goes up in flames. Human weaknesses win out over grand ideas.”

Pressed to describe the look of her production, Zambello hung back. “No, I’m not going to tell you what our Trojan Horse will look like,” she said with a conspiratorial wink. “Some things you have to find out for yourself.

“I promise you,” said Francesca Zambello, “you won’t be bored. Not for a minute.”

Every visitor, and even a few residents, recognize Manhattan as a paradise for the sightseer. But there needs to be a comparable word — “soundhearer,” perhaps? — for the music critic, with a few hours off from official duties, who decides to cruise the island specifically to sample its indigenous noises. Herewith, an account of a few hours of noise-cruising in Manhattan on a recent Thursday, a sp[endid day warmed by an Indian summer sun.

9:30 a.m. My hotel maintains a small coffee shop, run on what you might call informal principles. You find a seat; the man at the cash register, across the room, yells out a friendly “what’ll ya have?” and somehow a process is set in motion. A benign pandemonium reigns, punctuated by the horns and engine roarings of heavy crosstown traffic on 51st St.

9:50 a.m. Surcease awaits, directly across the street in the form of Greenacre Park: a small, blessed oasis, no larger than a single building site, with a 25-foot waterfall at one end, some handsome plantings, a few chairs and tables, a coffee bar. My day’s second cup, therefore, has a far more agreeable sound setting. From a seat beside the waterfall, all of New York recedes.

10:30 a.m. Not many years ago New York’s subways were a sonic nightmare: rattletrap cars, screeching brakes, outcries from protesting wheels rounding curves that could set your teeth on edge. New cars and track repairs have made life underground somewhat more bearable. Now you get harangued, all too clearlu, by the sleazoid beggars and peddlers on their rounds from car to car. And they get outshouted from time to time by the conductor’s station announcements over the p.a.system that is usallu on the blink.

10:50 a.m. End of the line, and blessed, momentary relief. Manhattan’s true miracle is the transformation that has taken place at the lower tip of the island: not only the gigantic towers of the World Trade Center, the World Financial Center and the waterside apartment complexes at Battery Park City, but the complex of personal amenities that have been installed in, under and beside these structures.

A walkways leads from the subway station directly to a concourse lined with markets, snackbars and formal restaurants. One level up, on the streets of Lower Manhattan, the sounds of traffic roil and surge; here, below ground, there’s only the sounds of foot traffic on stone flooring. Where else can you hear this strange mix of urgent pedestrian sounds in a seeming sound vacuum? The back streets of Venice (the one in Italy) come immediately to mind.

11 a.m. My wanderings lead me to the architectural jewel of the building complex, the Winter Garden on the ground level of Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center. A cascade of broad marble steps leads down to the floor level, to a vast garden lined with our own California fan palms. At the far end, a windowed facade looks out on New York harbor, with Lady Liberty and the newly restored Ellis Island in clear perspective.

Here, in a city where real estate is valued by the cubic inch, the prodigal space-wastage of the Winter Garden stops the breath. It astounds the ear as well. From the marble stairs, the distant rattle of china and silver at the cafe tables rings like the chatter of far-off birds. The clink and purr from the marimbas of a Mexican band, rehearsing for a free concert later in the day, echo from the upward-curving roof like points of audible light. As is only right, the Winter Garden serves as site for an ongoing list of free concerts; I note with envy that jazzman Milt Hinton is scheduled a few days from now when, alas, I’ll be otherwise engaged.

12 noon. Outdoors once again, I head toward Broadway, two blocks to the east. Silence reigns, as always, in the small, handsome churchyard at St. Paul’s Chapel, and inside as well. George Washington prayed here, moments before his inauguration as our first President, and his pew is nicely preseved. Trinity Church, a few blocks to the south, is the grander of New York’s two 18th- century churches, but I love St. Paul’s for its intimacy, and the way the silence seems to wrap itself around the visitor.

12:15 p.m. On route to Trinity, there is a small park a few steps below street level. There a girl on roller skates holds the crowd enthralled with her rap songs, helped by a ghetto blaster whose sound probably carries to New Jersey.

12:20 p.m. Fortunately, it doesn’t carry to Trinity’s elegant inner space, where an organist runs through some tortured 19th-century harmonies. I wait for a while, in hopes that he might try some Bach. No such luck.

12:30 p.m. Starting with the restrained, elegant rococo of Trinity, and then along the twisted, tiny, aimless streets of Lower Manhattan, it’s possible as in few American places to imagine yourself in some European town. Sure, the old buildings are now festooned with fast-food signs, but if you aim your gaze upward the fantasy of Old New York, before the invention of the grid pattern for streets (and the consequent gridlock), does take hold.

1 p.m. Along Fulton Street, heading east, the crescendo in fish odors tells me I’m heading in the right direction. To the west, Lower Manhattan is greatly enhanced by the new construction; on the east side, it’s the old structures, handsomely restored, that seize the attention. An area of several blocks at the end of Fluton, just before the East River has been closed to daytime traffic, and turned into a pedestrian mall, ringed by great old buildings. Again, as in the underground concourse, memories of the unnatural quiet on Venice’s untrafficked streets become inescapable.

The crown of the restoration is the South Street Seaport, with its few old ships still at anchor — converted, for the most part, into tourist traps, but still handsome on a late-September sunny day. In the open space a superior jazz combo holds forth (trombone, bass, drums): the Chicken Wing Trio. Not bad.

1:30 p.m. Across the street are New York’s two most serious seafood restaurants: Sweet’s, which as usual looks jammed, and Sloppy Louie’s, which doesn’t.Sloppy Louie’s main dining room is entirely tin-lined: walls and ceiling both. The bluefish is marvelous, but the sound level creates the sensation of a huge thumb, pushing me down toward the floor.

3 p.m. Back uptown, I soothe my ears in the sound of my waterfall.

It seems to be a Long Beach Opera axiom that the more challenging the work at hand the more brilliant the results. The results this season bear this out: an indifferent stab at a couple of sure-fire romantic melodramas to start, and now a torrent of enlightened imagination applied to Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande.” The production had its premiere on Wednesday night; two performances remain.

“Pelleas” is an opera for the brave in heart, on both sides of the footlights. It invests Maeterlinck’s sad, symbolic tale with a musical tapestry woven out of shadows. On the other hand, the opera — both text and music — is so full of half-meanings and ambiguities that it can be made to work in either a literal or symbolic production. The Long Beach forces, marshalled by stage director Brian Kulick, designers Mark Wendland and Craig Pierce, and conductor Paul Connelly, have chosen the latter approach.

You know what’s in store almost immediately, as the lost Golaud walks onto a bare platform, facing a barren mound that looks like sand strewn with waste paper, and sings of being “lost in a forest.” The forest is in Debussy’s music, not on the stage and that, to the producers, is enough. They make us believe, as well.

Some of the symbolic gadgetry may, in truth, be a little excessive. Melisande has no long hair to let down from her tower, so her Pelleas must cope with a symbolic bolt of some shiny fabric. The child Yniold does his spying number, not through a window into Melisande’s room but down into a cut-away doll-house. It isn’t Golaud who gets to hurl Melisande around by her hair, but a black-clad surrogate, one of three silent stooges who function as stagehands and who, on occasion, clutter the production with a welter of gratuitous images.

Yes, there are moments when less might have been more. Overriding these passing flaws, however, is a consistent production philosophy under which Debussy’s subtle, supple operatic masterpiece fills in the cramped spaces of the Center Theater, throbs with its own life-force, and comes across as the kind of challenging, memorable entertainment that has marked this company’s best work through the past decade.

Musically, the forces are equal to the dramatic demands. Nobody could confuse the matronly Michal Shamir for the child-bride of Maeterlinck’s text. Yet, under Connelly’s expert pacing, she creates a Melisande out of whole fabric, and her final moments are truly moving. James Schwisow is a Pelleas ardent and haunted; Neil Howlett a marvelously fluent, menacing Golaud. But the authentic miracle here is the Arkel of Jerome Hines, 70 this year, 50 years out from his professional singing debut (which happened to be in Los Angeles). You have to have those figures in front of you, to underscore the unbelievability factor in the rolling, rock-solid eloquence of this performance.

Connelly’s pacing of the score was judicious and sympathetic; his orchestra, behind a scrim in back of the performance, contributed an appropriately shadowy visual background — and an unscheduled laugh as well when, at the end, the scrim was pulled away on the line “why are all these people here?” Oh yes, the opera was sung in English, a translation by Hugh MacDonald. Against all fears of violence to the strange, half-lit French of Maeterlinck’s text, the new words worked remarkably well. A memorable, spellbinding evening, then; go see for yourselves.

THE FACTS: What: Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande,” by the Long Beach Opera.

When: Tonight [*] FRIDAY [F/L] at 8, April 28 at 2.

Where: Center Theater, Long Beach Convention Center.

Behind the scenes: staged by Brian Kulick; conducted by Paul Connelly; designed by Mark Wentland and Craig Pierce.

Tickets: $22 to $55. Information: 213 596-5556.

Our rating: * * * *

As expected, Luciano Pavarotti filled the Hollywood Bowl on Monday night, both with his voice and with his fans. The one was received by the others — 17.979 strong, the full Bowl capacity — with clear and obvious delight. It was a night that the true believers could take home, relive and cherish.

Pavarotti was, in fact, in fair voice quite a bit of the time. His chosen program could not exactly count as arduous. There was a generous spattering of instrumental pieces to allow the singer to replenish his stock of high notes, loud notes, soft and crooning notes and the rest of the vocal paraphernalia that has earned him his particular place on the cultural landscape.

There were also, of course, problems. As early as the third aria on the program, the “Cielo e mar” from Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” there were identifiable moments of strain. Later on, in the set of three sentimental Italian songs that concluded the program, there were vocal slips, small but constant. Now and again he seemed motivated to try a full-throated pianissimo, a beautiful effect when it works. This time, nothing worked.

Why nitpick? Simply because in a program such as this, with a vocal superstar at the center and nothing much around the edges. there isn’t much to concentrate on except questions of vocal excellence. There was only one message here, that Pavarotti can do no wrong. When he did something wrong, therefore, it stood out.

In fairness, there were also moments that were glowingly, glisteningly right. The big aria from Verdi’s “Luisa Miller,” which began Pavarotti’s part of the program, was ravishingly delivered. The “Turandot” aria that was the last of the five encores, was sent aloft sheathed in vocal brass, gold, steel and many rarer metals as well. Either of those moments was easily worth the price of a ticket (up to a thousand-dollar top).

Pavarotti aside, however, it was an evening strewn with silliness. This was the final stop of a portable package, put together by impresario Tibor Rudas, that also included the dubious services of conductor Leone Magiera and flutist Andrea Griminelli — here with an aggregation from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A clutch of instrumental tidbits filled in the spaces around the Pavarotti numbers, dispatched with no discernible grace. The lighting design leaned heavily toward a lurid hot pink that turned the stage into a monumental boudoir. Two truckloads of sound equipment were brought in, to replace — but not improve upon — the Bowl’s own excellent facilities.

This last proved an especially sore point. Someone among Rudas’ minions dreamed up the notion of bending the whole sound image toward a rock-style presentation, with dozens of microphones around the stage and with Pavarotti so heavily miked that the orchestra behind his arias might as well have gone home. The effect was more of a vocal recording being mimed than a live performance.

IIt could be that Pavarotti likes this line of work, and he can’t be blamed for liking the money it brings. But with the world’s supply of tenors in dire straits,it remains a shame that he has sealed himself off from serious culture. It must be noted, however, that nearly 18,000 screaming, whistling, stomping, cheering Pavarottists, at the Bowl on Monday night, acted as if they believed otherwise.