By Ark & Rocket

The weighty oaken doors of the Norman church of St. Bartholomew in Orford, England swung open with a groan, and out ran a small boy wearing the head of a mouse. After him tumbled a lion, a camel, an owl and an ass. Their capers among the tombstones scarcely drew a second glance from the local citizens, for everybody recognized them as the star performers of the Aldeburgh Festival's current star attraction: Benjamin Britten's eagerly awaited new music drama, Noye's Fludde.

The work did not tax Composer Britten's creative powers. Noye's Fludde (Noah's Flood) is a 14th century miracle play that Britten set to music by stitching in three oldtime hymns, including the Rev. John Bacchus Dykes's powerful Eternal Father, Strong to Save. The original text, retained by Britten in all its gamy Middle English splendor, closely follows the Biblical tale of Noah, with the startling exception that Mrs. Noah is portrayed as a drunken old bawd, unwilling to enter the ark without her unsavory bevy of gossips.

As staged last week in St. Bartholomew's nave, Fludde opened with a roll of drums and a booming threat of destruction from God: "I see my people in deede and thoughte are sette full fowle in synne!" (God, unfortunately visible behind the organ, was a large fat man in a blue lounge suit.) While Noah and his sons built an ark (it was carried onstage by an assortment of blue-smocked prop men), Mrs. Noah stood aside and jeered (moaned Noah: "Lord that wemen be crabbed ay!"). The "animals"--a chorus of 70 children--marched two by two into the ark caroling "Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie eleison," and the orchestra launched with a crash into cymbal-punctuated storm music that reached its climax in a beautifully descanted chorus of Eternal Father. As the storm subsided, the cast climbed back to the stage singing a four-part Britten Alleluia, filed out singing Thomas Tallis' The Spacious Firmament on High.

Composer Britten, a resident of Aldeburgh (pop. 2,689), likes to write for children--"They find my idiom easier than grownups do, and they don't argue with me. You never find a child saying, 'That note should be F natural.' " He recruited his 5-to 17-year-old chorus from three neighboring schools, gave them three months to learn their lines and six weeks to learn the music. What impressed him even more than their musical aptitude was their anxiety to please. Early in the rehearsal period, he spotted a small boy wearing a duck label, asked him if he could quack. "No," said the boy solemnly, "but I'm double-jointed."

While Noah and family were constructing their ark last week, a crew of ballet dancers in goggles and aprons was busy on a Boston stage, pounding together a Victorian-styled spaceship for a nostalgic trip to the moon. The occasion: the U.S. premiere of Jacques Offenbach's minor operetta Voyage to the Moon, based on Jules Verne's yarn. First performed in Paris in 1875, Offenbach's Voyage caused a momentary sensation among premature space bugs, then disappeared from the repertory and has rarely been seen since. The story, as revived by the newly formed Boston Opera Group, concerns one Prince Caprice of the Kingdom of Flambeau, who persuades the nation's top scientist, Dr. Blastoff, to design him a moon rocket with plushy upholstery, an anchor at its stern, gaily-blinking lights and signal flags. This vehicle was trundled off the Boston Public Garden's stage last week and sent moonward with a bang, a yellow flash and an ominous puff of smoke. From there on, with the help of a first-rate cast (Tenors Norman Kelley and David Lloyd, Bass Baritone Donald Gramm, Sopranos Adelaide Bishop and Lorena Spence), the opera worked its way to the moon and back, picking up a Purple People Eater as it went along.

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