Ariadne at Edinburgh

By motor, train and plane (including a special once-a-day turbojet transport which made it from London in 90 minutes), the first wave of a record crowd of 150,000 poured into Edinburgh. American collegians in crew cuts and seersuckers, arty Frenchmen wearing beards and corduroys, sturdy Scandinavians in hiking boots and shorts, grey-haired elders with guidebooks in hand thronged broad, flag-lined Princes and George Streets, puffed up Castle Hill, or jammed into pubs where Scotch was plentiful at 63-c- a double shot.*

Edinburgh was ready for them with its biggest musical show ever. On opening night, a big crowd packed vast Usher Hall to hear Conductor Roger Desormiere and his Orchestre National de la Radiodifjusion Francaise start things off. Before the three-week festival is over, visitors will hear, in all, 1,630 musicians and actors from eight nations, including six orchestras, four choirs, five chamber ensembles, more than 40 soloists, three ballet companies, one opera company. The only cancellation: Professor Skupa's Puppet Theatre, which was forbidden by the Czech government to leave Prague.

Chin Tufts & Bravos. Last week, after concerts by the U.S.'s flamboyant Leonard Bernstein (conducting from the piano), the redoubtable Sir Thomas Beecham and France's crack Loewenguth String Quartet, one performance stood out as loftily as old Edinburgh Castle itself. In King's Theatre, when the curtain went down on the Glyndebourne Opera Company's new and magnificent production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, the audience leaped to their feet, mixed their applause with wave after wave of bravos.

To Edinburgh oldtimers, Glyndebourne's production of Ariadne, a complex opera-within-a-play, was the four-year-old festival's most ambitious single project yet. Some of the credit went to chin-tufted Sir Thomas Beecham in the pit. But most of it was due to a big, swarthy, white-maned man named Carl Ebert, who has directed the famed Glyndebourne, and all of its festival productions, since Glyndebourne's start in 1934.

"Musical Convent." A onetime Max Reinhardt student, German-born, 63-year-old Carl Ebert is one operatic director who insists that his "singing actors" know "the exact meaning of what they are singing and . . . strive to make it sound believable by their actions and expressions."

In his "musical convent" at Glyndebourne, the Sussex estate of British Millionaire John Christie, Ebert puts even the most experienced star through four or five weeks of rehearsals before they ever get on the boards. He is likely to step out in rehearsal and say in a mild, pleasant voice, "Now in my opinion, what the composer wanted to show here was . . ." and then leap through the action himself. A perfectionist, he rehearsed one scene in Ariadne 50 times. Even after the opera is onstage, Artistic Director Ebert still finds work to do. At Ariadne's opening he perched up in the lighting box, made four pages of notes on slow entrances, faulty gestures, sloppy curtain calls.

When the festival is over, Ebert will board ship for the U.S. Since 1948, he has spent his winters teaching opera at the University of Southern California. He has already brought one of his American students to help him out of Glyndebourne and Edinburgh. Bob Herman, 25, son of onetime Brooklyn Daffy Dodger Babe Herman, is now his year-round assistant producer. Says Ebert: "Opera has a long way to go in America . . . There is too much accent on voices, not enough on stage presence. Nobody spends nearly nough time rehearsing."

*More impressive to order than to drink. In the United Kingdom, a double whisky is i J4 to 2 oz., about the size of a single drink in U.S. bars.

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