A Vivid Gallic Trio at the Met

By Martha Duffy

But Artist David Hockney 's sets add a strong British accent

The perfumed, black-tie crowd that poured into Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera house last Friday was in for a surprise. What were those subway-style graffiti doing all over the proscenium arch? What kind of message was it, spelling out the names of Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel, composers of elegance and wit? And what was all the barbed wire doing out there on the naked stage, not to mention the forlorn, bullet-torn French flag?

There were plenty of hints, but no real answer, as the Met staged its first new production of a season shortened by labor disputes. It was a trio of French works, with the umbrella title of Parade. The idea of presenting Satie's slight ballet Parade, Poulenc's absurdist opera buffa Les Mamelles de Tiresias and Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges came from Met Production Adviser John Dexter. The common theme was not World War I (though with effort all the pieces can be connected to it) but the devices of British Artist David Hockney, 43, who presided over the visual aspects of the show. Hockney, noted for his sophisticated, figurative paintings, has done successful productions of The Rake's Progress and The Magic Flute at the Glyndebourne Festival. Here he triumphs when he concentrates on conjuring up a vivid, magical spectacle. When he reaches for social comment, he fails. These diaphanous Gallic conceits cannot be made into Oh! What a Lovely War.

Satie suffers most. His featherweight Parade owes its place in theatrical history largely to Picasso's sets and costumes. The story of carnival players trying to lure a crowd into their act is trampled by the arrival of weary soldiers from the front, still wearing gas masks. Nor is there any support from Gray Veredon's pallid, inert choreography. (Leonide Massine created the original dances.) As Harlequin, Gary Chryst works hard, but his role is never allowed to gain momentum.

Les Mamelles fares better. The barbed wire is pushed off into a corner, and the sets are Dufy-bright and lively. The story, a gutsy farce that Poulenc took from a drama by Apollinaire, concerns a fed-up woman named Therese (Soprano Catherine Malfitano) who decides to quit the second sex by removing her breasts--really two bright balloons. Meanwhile, her husband (Baritone David Holloway) assumes female dress and godlike fecundity; in a day he/she produces 40,049 offspring. Eventually both resume their original genders and celebrate the need to repopulate the world after war. Among Hockney's wacky touches: solemn wicker baby prams and grave pasteboard infants who pop up from them. Malfitano and Holloway may not have mastered French singing style, but they have strong, well trained voices capable of bringing down the house, Broadway-style.

The masterpiece on this bill, an exquisitely orchestrated work full of both lyricism and humor, is L 'Enfant et les Sortileges (literally The Child and the Sorceries). Colette wrote the libretto, a serenely wise fantasy about a child's guilt after a temper tantrum. When L'Enfant was first produced in 1925, George Balanchine, then 21, provided the incidental choreography. But noble lineage does not burden this opera in the way that it does Satie's Parade, probably because it offers ample possibilities for different interpretations. The little boy (played by Mezzo-Soprano Hilda Harris) defies his mother, wrecks a pendulum clock, trashes a teapot, tears his books, rips the wallpaper off the wall, pulls the cat's tail and more.

All the victims promptly rise up to rebuke and terrify him. Dexter has taken a sunny approach to this nightmare. Harassed frogs are still genial; abused cats take a philosophical view. In L'Enfant Hockney creates his richest, most brilliant sets and French Conductor Manuel Rosenthal coaxes the most subtle performance from the Met orchestra. It has been said that the Ravel work is such a perfect distillation of orchestral and vocal art that it resists dramatization, that no physical embodiment of it is possible. Perhaps.Yet the Met does justice to the masterpiece with an approach that is both witty and tender, and one leaves under the spell of Ravel's miracles.

Still, the evening was a bit of a puzzlement. Even though the Ravel was a success, why does a major opera house try to produce dance, a project like Parade, when the American Ballet Theater will occupy its very premises in two months' time and George Balanchine reigns just across Lincoln Center Plaza?

--By Martha Duffy

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