Merry-Go-Round at the Met

In the first act of the Metropolitan Opera's new Don Pasquale, Baritone Frank Guarrera peeks behind a screen where Coloratura Roberta Peters is making an onstage costume change. "Brava," he sings with a leer. "Brava, brava!" That sentiment might well serve as comment on the whole production. Peters & Co. have turned Gaetano Donizetti's old (1843) comic opera into something to cheer about.

Anybody peeking behind the scenes before performance time would have found most of the interest focused on something new in Met history (though long used by European opera houses): a revolving stage. The question was whether it would ever work well enough to permit any bravas at all. Almost every time it was turned, to switch the action from one to another of Designer Wolfgang Roth's three pretty sets, something got caught. But by curtain time, the mechanism was behaving itself. The evening proved one of the Met's gayest in years--a mood helped along by a ballet prelude, Soiree, choreographed by Zachary Solov against a brilliant setting by Cecil Beaton.

The opera itself was tuneful as a merry-go-round. Lanky (6 ft. 2 in.) Conductor Thomas Schippers. making his Met debut at 25, kept a wary eye roving over the orchestra. With the same vigor he had shown in the pit of Menotti's Saint of Bleecker Street (TIME, Jan. 10), he put a spin on every phrase. The music chuckled, twittered and bounced from one carefree music-hall polka into another.

The plot concerns an aging wolf who manages to marry his nephew's intended. Once the marriage contract is signed, the sweet little bride turns into an extravagant shrew, and the poor fellow finds himself so hopelessly outmaneuvered that he is delighted to give the girl back to his nephew. The Met cast mercifully played everything in low key rather than for low comedy.

Fernando Corena, as Don Pasquale, entered wearing a vivid green apron, for the Met staging makes him a passionate amateur gardener; he sang in a deeply resonant style that may ultimately restore their proper musical qualities to comic basso roles, long lost in mere boom-and-rasp renditions. Tenor Cesare Valletti sang with the sweetness and eloquence of a low-pressure Caruso. Pretty Coloratura Peters was expertly coquettish. Using her voice almost as if it were a tangible object, she tossed a trill to port, another to starboard, a third dead amidships of the great opera house.

Don Pasquale was an obvious success; with a good English libretto, it could be one of the Met's alltime smash hits.

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