Triple-Threat Man

The Metropolitan Opera usually picks a conductor to work at his specialty, thus assigns him to one particular "wing" of the Met repertory, i.e., the French, German or Italian. Jonel Perlea, the goateed Rumanian conductor whom the Met hired this season, had no specialty, and the Met decided he needed none. When he arrived in Manhattan in October, he was told that he would have to work in all three wings. His first assignments: Tristan und Isolde,

Rigoletto, Carmen. By last week, Conductor Perlea had proved that he was just the man who could do it.

To the Met audience, the season's first Tristan, which Perlea directed, sounded different from any performance they had ever heard before. The voices were familiar: Melchior and Traubel sang the title roles. But the performance seemed to have a new sweetness and clarity, a subdued splendor. Says Perlea, "Too many conductors mistake heroic for loud." In Rigoletto, he proved that he knew how to build a musical melodrama without throwing away climaxes. The result: when the real climax came in the last-act murder scene, it was overwhelming. Carmen was the same story; with the pace he gave Bizet's fast-moving tragedy, it seemed to move swiftly without being rushed. By last week Perlea had cemented his reputation as an operatic triple threat by conducting a superbly lyric Traviata.

Now 49, Perlea acquired some of his operatic versatility clandestinely. Son of an "incredibly rich" land-owning Rumanian father and a German mother, in school he used to study scores instead of his Latin, hiding them on his lap in the classroom. He studied piano, cello and violin ("The piano is the instrument I play least badly"), later studied composition at the Munich Conservatory. By the time he was 21 he was conducting at the Leipzig Opera House; at 29 he was general manager of the Bucharest Opera. In 1944, the Nazis interned both Jonel and his writer wife for refusing to declare themselves pro-German. Liberated at war's end by the British, the Perleas went to Italy. Jonel eventually got a job conducting at La Scala, Milan.

Although his English has not yet advanced much beyond "O.K.," Perlea speaks four other languages and has no trouble at all talking to the Met musicians. "The strings and woodwinds--German: the brass--Italian: and what's left --French." He is enthusiastic about the quality of the orchestra, says it would take La Scala's orchestra six rehearsals to accomplish what the Met's can do in two. As for the rest: "Every opera performance is a compromise. If you can accomplish 15% of what you intend, you are all right; if you accomplish 50%, you are terrific."

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