Popular Pachyderm

Manhattan Composer Nicolai Berezowsky and Conductor Thomas Scherman once "sat down and agreed to three propositions : 1) besides Humperdinck's heavy-handed Hansel and Gretel, there are precious few operas acceptable to children; 2) Scherman's Little Orchestra Society is always ready & willing to tackle a new score; and 3) the adventures of a young and appealingly unsophisticated elephant named Babar* are bread & butter to large numbers of children and ex-children. With Mrs. Berezowsky they worked out sketches, got Dorothy (Porgy) Heyward to try her hand at a libretto. The result, after nearly two years: the premiere last week at Manhattan's Hunter College of a children's opera called Babar the Elephant.

Amidst the twittering that precedes any children's program, the orchestra seated itself kitty-cornered across stage right. Actors in monkey suits planted narrow banners with simply designed pictures of jungle palms on the left. Onstage came a clutch of people wearing elephant heads --and the show was on. The story took the little elephant from his African jungle to the big city, into a school ("Good children in the front, bad children in the back"), into virtual slavery in a circus, and finally back into the jungle, where Babar married the princess, became king, and lived happily ever after.

Composer Berezowsky, once a violinist with the Coolidge Quartet and now a staff musician at CBS, turned in an hour-long score of easy melodies and rather plush harmonies. When an elephant became perplexed, the violins and xylophone played good-humored glissandos. When a camel strode, the tuba booped in tempo. And when a song showed signs of becoming too sugary, its harmonies were spiced with dissonance. Berezowsky's best moments came in the circus scene, when he let him self go in razzle-dazzle imitations of a wind band.

The 2,000-odd youngsters seemed to like it all very much. But the life or death of a new children's opera depends pretty much on capricious oldsters. Babar seems to stand a better chance than most : the Little Orchestra plans to do a repeat performance in Newark, N.J. this week, and radio & TV folks are interested.

*Created by the late Jean de Brunhoff and perpetuated by his son Laurent, The Story of Babar, The Travels of Babar, Babar the King, and six other sequels have sold more than 2,000,000 copies in the U.S.

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