Music: A Mass for Everyone, Maybe

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Ironically, the one institutional question left unanswered by opening night was how the opera house sounded. As proved by the $3,000,000 already spent to improve Philharmonic Hall at New York City's Lincoln Center, acoustics can involve the pocketbook as much as the ear. Mass proved nothing about the opera house, since Bernstein relied heavily on amplification—body mikes for most of the soloists, hand mikes for the rock singer, floor mikes to pick up the dialogue. But as the week rolled on, it became apparent that the Kennedy Center sounded infinitely better than it looked.

With President Nixon in attendance, Conductor Antal Dorati and the National Symphony Orchestra went through a program of Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky and William Schuman that filled the center's concert hall with rich, vibrant and joyously reverberant highs, lows and middles. The opera house's acoustical turn came on Friday, with the premiere of Beatrix Cenci by Argentinian Master Alberto Ginastera. It was produced by the Opera Society of Washington. Brutal and bloody, the work runs a full gamut of orchestral and vocal sound. It proved beyond doubt that the opera house is one of the best-sounding auditoriums in the U.S.

In more ways than acoustics, Beatrix Cenci was a remarkable climax to a successful inaugural week. When it comes to piling horror on horror, Ginastera outclasses anyone now writing for the operatic stage. Beatrix Cenci can best be described as Renaissance Gothic. Based partly on history, partly on the Shelley tragedy, it tells how a young Roman noblewoman (Soprano Arlene Saunders) is seduced by her choleric, morally corrupt father. Count Francesco Cenci (Bass-Baritone Justino Díaz), then revenges herself by arranging his murder. In the end, she is found out, tortured on the rack, beheaded. Not a libretto to every composer's taste, naturally, but just the thing for the savage, harshly dissonant musical style already familiar , from Ginastera's equally grim Don Rodrigo and Bomarzo.

Vacant Eyeballs. The composer's champion in the U.S. is Julius Rudel, who has conducted both Rodrigo and Bomarzo as director of the New York City Opera. Now music director of the Kennedy Center as well, he conducted the Cenci, and was uncommonly adroit in defining the multiple layers of orchestral sound with which Ginastera's score seeks to suggest, say, the schizophrenic, as he explores the passions and fears of one of his characters. But that was nothing compared with the multiple-screen images—slides and film of doomed faces, vacant eyeballs, writhing bodies, running women—that delved into the past, present and future like a Bergman movie gone berserk.

Washington has ceased to be part of the musical provinces. · William Bender