A Musical Summer Guide to Europe

June in Europe marks not only the opening of the sightseeing season, but also the annual recurrence of festival fever. This summer U.S. tourists will find more than 50 music festivals to choose from. There are the usual flying squads of big-name soloists, concert-hopping on split-week schedules, and the customary local specialties. The dominant flavor this year is contemporary, with a spate of premieres scheduled. Among the top attractions:

Prague (May 12-June 3). Now in its 15th year, it remains the only Eastern European festival as lavish as its Western counterparts. Highlights of its month-long program: Mikhail Glinka's Russian and Ludmilla, a less well-known but far better work than Glinka's only other opera, A Life for the Tsar, Gustav Mahler's massive oratorio, Das Lied von der Erde. to be played in the ancient Gothic St. Vitus Cathedral; the first performance outside Russia of Dmitry Shostakovich's new Concerto lor Violoncello.

Florence (May to-June 30). Celebrates the 200th anniversary of Florentine Composer Luigi Cherubini's birth with the first modern performance of his long-forgotten Elisa. The Maggio Musicale will also offer a handful of 20th century works, including Janacek's Jenufa, will feature concerts by Milan's Nuovo Quartette, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Warsaw, Violinist Isaac Stern.

Brussels (May 2-June 23). An International Festival that relies almost entirely on visiting troupes, including Britain's Royal Opera in a production of John Gardner's The Moon and Sixpence, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Little Ballet Troupe of Bombay and the 360-member Sofia Opera, which will present the first Western stage performance of Prokofiev's War and Peace.

-L-ausanne (May 25-June 22). Now in its sixth year, it is Western Europe's best showcase for little-known Communist talent. Among this year's visitors: the 250-member Belgrade Opera (in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Kho-vantchina, Tchaikovsky's Eugen Onegin), the Budapest Ballet, the Warsaw Symphony.

Spoleto (June 8-July 10). Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds rounds into its third year with its finances noticeably sagging but its programing as lively as ever. The opener is a new production of La Boheme, directed by Menotti and conducted by Thomas Schippers. Also on the program: three works by the newly formed Spoleto ballet company, Cherubini's rarely heard Missa Solemnis.

Gologne (June 10-19). The most ambitious of contemporary music festivals offers 16 world premieres by such avant-garde composers as Mauricio Kagel, Herbert Eimert, Pierre Boulez, Wolfgang Fortner, Karl Blomdahl and Karl-heinz Stockhausen, whose Contest Between Electronic Sound and Instruments is expected to be the festival's most impressive explosion of sound.

Aldeburgh (June11-26). In a bleak antique setting, this remains the most determinedly regional of European festivals. Founded by Benjamin Britten, it has been the site of numerous Britten premieres, will this summer offer his new full-length opera, Midsummer Night's Dream.

'Holland (June 15~July 15). The largest of the European festivals crams 125 concerts, operas and dance programs into its four weeks. The emphasis is on the moderns, and the festival's high point this year will be the world premiere of Dutch Composer Henk Badings' opera on postwar refugees titled Martin Korda, D.P.

0ranada (June 23-July 3). The festival celebrates the centenary of the birth of Spain's folk-flavored Composer-Pianist Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909). Among the visitors to the Alhambra gardens: the Madrid National Orchestra, Sopranos Victoria de los Angeles and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

Drottningholm (June 19-Sept. 15). Exact replicas of 18th century ballets and operas, produced in Sweden's 200-year-old Drottningholm Court Theater, which still has all of the original props and stage machinery intact. Performances, with a wigged orchestra in the pit, include The Barber of Seville, written by Giovanni Paisiello more than 30 years before Rossini turned his hand to the same theme.

Antibes & guan-les-Cpins (July 7-15). The Riviera's first jazz festival--and one of the first to be organized anywhere in Europe--is expected to attract 250 musicians from 17 countries, including the Thelonious Monk Trio from the U.S., il Duce's son. Pianist Romano Mussolini, plus combos from Eastern Europe and probably Russia.

Nervi (july 7-28). The fifth International Ballet Festival features for the first time a resident "Nervi Ballet Company" under the direction of Veteran Choreographer Leonide Massine, 66. who personally rehearses every dancer, refreshing himself by going into hourly yoga trances. With his 80 dancers from 17 nations, Massine plans the world premiere of his own ballet, based on Boccaccio's Decameron.

Aix-en-Provence(July 9-31). A festival that usually concentrates on Mozart branches out this summer with such rarities as Gounod's Le Medecin Malgre Lui, Vivaldi's La Senna Festeggiante. Among the visitors: Artur Rubinstein, Denise Duval, choruses from La Scala and the Vienna Opera. Juiy to-Aug. 24). Yugoslavia's main bid for the tourist trade, now in its eleventh year, offers opera (Purcell, Donizetti, Dvorak), symphony concerts, chamber music, and a rich helping of Serbian and Croatian folk songs and dances in a setting something like a medieval Nice.

Bayreuth (July 23-Aug. 25). The Wagner brothers-Wolfgang and Wieland--will mount eight of their grandfather's music dramas in their famed, severely symbolic and anti-realistic style. Included in this year's agenda: the staggering task of mounting new productions of all four operas in the Ring cycle.

Salzburg (July 26-Aug. 31). Celebrating their 40th year in the festival business, Salzburgers can boast the opening of a new Festspielhaus with the world's largest indoor stage (98 ft. wide). Despite protests that the house is too big for intimate Mozart operas, the festival offers a tried--and somewhat trying--variation on a familiar formula: Strauss's Rosenkavalier, Verdi's Don Carlo, plenty of Mozart.

Gstaad (Aug. 8-18). Founded three years ago by longtime Summer Resident Yehudi Menuhin, it now attracts front-rank musicians who are hand-picked by Yehudi. get no fee. In the 14th century Protestant Church of Saanen. the wealthy chalet set will this year hear Yehudi play with the Zurich Chamber Music Orchestra and his sister Hepzibah in a series devoted to works of Schubert, Debussy, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and Mozart.

Edinburgh (Aug. 21-Sept. 10). Britain's largest festival combines flamboyance and elegance with serious if unadventurous endeavor--quantities of Brahms, Beethoven, Verdi and Mozart, with two premieres: William Walton's Second Symphony, Humphrey Searle's Third Symphony.

Montreux (Aug. 31-Sept. 25). Hampered by the lack of a first-class concert hall (a visiting violinist once bitterly referred to the "grotto acoustics" of the lakeside pavilion), the festival directors nevertheless present excellent large-scale concerts by the Orchestre National de Paris and the Symphony of the Nordwestdeutsche Rundfunk. Among the participants: Conductors Eugen Jochum, Ernest Ansermet and Andre Cluytens, Virtuosos Nathan Milstein, Artur Rubinstein, Pierre Fournier, Zino Francescatti.

Venice (Sept. 12-27). New works by Italian composers plus the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's 15-minute religious oratorio Gesualdo Monumentum, a work inspired by the writings of 16th century Madrigal Composer Don Carlo Gesualdo (who evidently used his music to sublimate his personal troubles; he had his wife and her lover murdered, suffocated one of his children).

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