Volunteer Orchestra

The auditorium is tiny, cluttered and creaky with age. Spectators in the front row run the danger of being skewered by the conductor's baton, and a singer who wants to be heard has to shout down the throat of the tuba. But despite such drawbacks, the audience at Manhattan's Xavier Theater last week saw and heard as fine a revival of Gian-Carlo Menotti's stark Greenwich Village drama. The Saint of Bleecker Street, as the opera is likely to receive. What made the production even more surprising was that not one of the professional performers was paid.

Personal Underground. The Xavier Theater (700 seats) in lower Manhattan is one of two headquarters of a remarkable organization--the Xavier Symphony Society. The society's other headquarters: a Broadway hotel room from which Conductor Vincent La Selva dispatches telephoned entreaties to a kind of personal underground consisting of about 300 musicians. From this list he recruits the orchestra he needs for any of the Xavier Society's free concerts or opera productions. Since the musicians all play for the fun of it, La Selva is never quite sure how much of his orchestra will turn up. But the quality of his replacements is high; regular members of the Minneapolis, St. Louis and Pittsburgh orchestras who drift to New York after the symphony season "call Vince" as a matter of routine.

Conductor La Selva, 31, is far more than a musical talent scout--as last week's performance demonstrated. He whipped his orchestra through a fiery performance that seemed to burn with fresh brilliance along Menotti's arching melodic lines. Moreover, La Selva kept his singers working in fine coordination with the orchestra as he cued their entrances with a fiercely stabbing finger, a violent toss of his head. At opera's end Composer Menotti, who had watched misty-eyed, rushed backstage to embrace La Selva. "I was," said a surprised Menotti, "extremely moved."

Secondhand Trumpet. Back home in Cleveland, where his father is a factory worker, gifted Vince La Selva begged for and got a secondhand trumpet when he was eight. As a prized member of his high school band, La Selva was allowed to conduct occasionally, but when he entered Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, it was to study the trumpet. At Juilliard, La Selva organized a 60-member student orchestra, later revived it when the Army stationed him at Governors Island.

In 1957, La Selva got permission to use the Xavier Theater (attached to the Xavier High School), began by putting on concert programs, then added opera. Since then, the symphony has given 50 concerts, 35 operatic performances (Tosca, Rigoletto, Traviata, Boheme, Bleecker Street).

After last week's performance, Conductor La Selva looked more than usually harried as he took his customary bow: he had just learned that he had lost his trombone section, and he wanted to get on the phone.

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