Campus Honors

Spring is the season when Amerlcan college opera companies pretend that they are the Metropolitan, La Scala, or Covent Garden. Often the results amount to just that--pretending. This year, however, campuses are positively blooming with new opera productions and new opera houses that New York, Milan and London could well be proud of. The architecture and stage facilities tend to be lavish, the repertory venturesome and the level of performances impressively high. In Connecticut next week, the University of Bridgeport will open a $5 million arts center with Neil Slater's Again, D.J., a rock-flavored updating of the Don Juan legend. Last week at Washington's Kennedy Center, a contingent from the University of Hawaii staged a 16th century Peking opera titled Black Dragon Residence, using tapes of authentic Oriental instruments and singing in English. Three other of last week's highlights:

Whatever immortality Composer Virgil Thomson wins will probably rest on his operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and Mother of Us All (1947). Sophisticated and witty, both works catch up words and music in the kind of embrace that could be devised only by a man born to write for the voice. Thus the air of eager anticipation before last week's premiere of Thomson's third opera, Lord Byron, at Manhattan's Juilliard School. Would it once and for all establish Thomson as America's foremost operatic composer?

Alas, no. Lord Byron is infused with Thomson's musical craftsmanship--adroit trios and sextets, transparent orchestral writing--but not the expressive spark to illuminate the drama. An exception is the nostalgic suite of dances for the third-act ballet (choreographed by Alvin Ailey) that depicts Byron's travels, amours and death in Europe. The rest is a feeble reminder of a once-insinuating talent.

The story takes place after Byron's death, so the hero appears only in flashback and as a ghost. The whole work is framed as an answer to the question of why Westminster Abbey would not allow Byron's body to be interred there. Thomson might almost have called it "One Sinner in Three Acts," because he dwells almost exclusively on the rakish side of Byron's character--his playboy excesses, his foppish haughtiness, his promiscuous escapades with both sexes. The listener must take Byron's poetic and personal genius on faith.

It does not help at all that in Jack Larson's libretto, Byron is given some of his own best lines. "She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies," is turned from soliloquy into colloquy, as the operatic Byron croons to one of his lady loves, "You walk in beauty," etc. Chuckles even broke out in the audience when Byron's friend, Thomas Moore, stepped to the stage apron to sing, "Remember that genius that gleamed in his verse." The tune turned out to be that for Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms. True, the real Thomas Moore wrote that old favorite, but he might just have had a different, more intimate kind of apron in mind. -William Bender

The University of Indiana's opera department compares with some of its rivals the way a 747 jet compares with Piper Cubs. Since 1948 the school has produced 107 operas. It gives a performance every week, has five bands, four orchestras, a ballet company and an ambition that overreaches many professional companies. To all that, Indiana has now added an $11.3 million musical arts center. What better way to show off the new 1,460-seat theater than to put on an opera written by a faculty member? To wit: Heracles, Composer John Eaton's 3 1/2-hour treatment of Sophocles' legendary Greek hero.

Eaton's epic is bristlingly serial and uncompromisingly cerebral. "It finished off eight centuries of musical technique, at least for me," says Eaton. For many listeners Heracles may simply have finished off serialism, suggesting that little more can be done to make that strait-laced and formulistic method of sticking notes together work in operatic terms. Eaton's grasp of musical technique is distinctly impressive, but his sense of theater is so undeveloped it verges on naivete. Heracles' characters discourse at enormous length but never with enough musical depth to make themselves or their arguments convincing. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Eaton knows how to use an orchestra; his is big and tactful, never swamping the singers, but it only comments on the action. It does nothing to enlighten it.

Heracles could have used enlightenment. The plot is complicated, dealing with the hero's military and political feats, full of comparisons between then and now. Massive, glowering sets by the late C. Mario Cristini conjured up ancient architectural glories before which Indiana's large cast vocalized their lengthy roles with apparent ease, acting with an intensity that would have done credit to any major theater.

If only the opera had possessed the flair displayed by the stage crew after the opening night performance. While the audience followed instructions to stay in their seats, the curtains opened, platforms rolled, turntables spun, scenery zipped up and vanished heavenward. Then another stage rolled out, bearing an army of aproned waitresses and tables laden with complimentary

food and drinks. Can the Met match that? "Robert T.Jones

Five years ago, retired Cincinnati industrialist J. Ralph Corbett--whose Corbett Foundation is one of U.S. opera's great benefactors--presented the University of Cincinnati with a new, 717-seat auditorium. Then Corbett and his wife Patricia decided that the university's music complex needed a more intimate house alongside it. To open its acoustically superb 400-seat Patricia Corbett Theater, the university announced what seemed an unlikely production: Pier Francesco Cavalli's 321-year-old opera Calisto, which Conductor Raymond Leppard dusted off for Britain's Glyndebourne Festival in 1970. By last week, the little-known Calisto was the hottest ticket in town.

No wonder. The work is an unabashed sex comedy, a Myra Breckenridgian imbroglio of ungodly carryings-on among ancient deities. Cavalli's music floats along, endless melodious recitative, rich with strings, harps and harpsichord. The music makes even a blush-laden plot acceptable: Jove desires nubile Calisto, a virgin in the temple of Diana. Figuring correctly that Calisto will do anything Diana tells her, old Jove transforms himself into a replica of that bosomy goddess. Meanwhile the real Goddess Diana is cavorting with a local shepherd. After her gay, if confusing, romance, poor Calisto is turned first into a bear, then into the constellation of Ursa Major.

The Cincinnati students played their ribald roles with enormous style and verve, coping with the 17th century music as if it were as familiar as La Boheme. Set Designer Paul Shortt's floating clouds, silver rain and heavenly chariots were magically effective. The double Diana switched her sex with dazzling ease, garnering great applause from Cincinnati's sophisticates--and some rather hysterical giggles from startled youngsters who came unprepared for a lesbian love duet. "R.T.J.

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