Manon as It Should Be

Massenet's Manon is a French opera of more refined and delicate charms than Puccini's booming, Italianate Manon Lescaut, although both are based on the same Abbe Prevost novel. It is a big opera, but for best effect it needs a production with the intimacy of opera comique--one reason it has never been much more than a singers' showpiece at the Metropolitan (last performance: 1948). Last week, as the only new production of the New York City Opera's spring season, Massenet's Manon got the kind of performance it calls for.

In the comparatively compact City Center Theater, Stage Director Jose Ruben, veteran of both opera and Broadway (and once Sarah Bernhardt's leading man), made Manon move through all its five acts with proper sentiment and subtlety. In the pit, French Conductor Jean Morel kept the pace clean and precise. And the singing, French diction included, of City Opera's young Americans could hardly have been better.

Los Angeles-born Soprano Ann Ayars looked and sounded well in the part of the loving, pleasure-mad, 18th Century Manon. What she lacked in artfulness, her gallant and unhappy lover made up in charm and ardor. As the Chevalier des Grieux, young (27) Philadelphia-born Tenor David Poleri turned out to be one of the finds of the season. Laszlo Halasz, director of City Opera, heard Poleri last fall on a Chicago radio show. Handsome Poleri sang Des Grieux as if he had learned it straight from Caruso; his voice, less powerful and assured, is sweeter, lighter in color. He acted his part as if he were born to it.

Why had shrewd Director Halasz picked Manon? Partly because, under Conductor Morel, he had "the strongest French wing in the U.S. To be brutally frank," saic Halasz, there was another, equally good reason: "The Met didn't do very much with the French repertory this season.

"You know," he said with a glance at his friend Rudolf Bing, who had come to hear Manon, "now that the Met has an alert director, I have to be very alert too."

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