A little lower than festive.

FOR the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, 1996 was not a good year. Gian Carlo Menotti relinquished the leadership (though not necessarily the reins) to his adoptive son, Francis, an uncharismatic figure. The mayor wishes to gain control, subsidies are imperiled, the natives are restless. Menotti and the sister festival in Charleston parted company several years ago, though there are rumors of reconciliation. I myself caught only the last nine days of the festival, thereby perhaps missing some good things. Or perhaps not.

Now in its 39th year, this festival of classical music also includes light music, ballet, theater, art exhibitions, and even some film. Of the musical offerings, by far the most satisfying are the midday concerts, 75 minutes on average, in the charming little Teatro Caio Melisso on the Piazza del Duomo. These are chosen partly by the violist Scott Nickrenz and his flautist wife, Paula Robison, and partly by Menotti and his protege, the forty-year-old conductor Steven Mercurio.

My first event was the concerto di mezzogiorno for July 7, a special one celebrating Menotti's 85th birthday, with a huge bouquet of flowers floating in from the wings and the maestro in attendance. The program included the two thus far finished movements of a delightful chamber trio by Menotti, and, as a surprise highlight, the Grieg Violin Sonata magisterially performed by Joshua Bell and Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

The noontime concerts -- mostly chamber and instrumental, with a sprinkling of orchestral music -- concentrate on baroque and classical, more rarely romantic or modern. Most memorable for me was a Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, idiomatically sung by Iride Martinez, and the Cesar Franck Piano Quintet with Thibaudet at the keyboard. Unfortunately, Miss Robison is the commcre at these events, and her cutesy jocularity in bad Italian and precious English, her mincing and flirting with the audience, are like some travesty out of a misogynistic Bertolucci movie.

Unlike last year, which featured (I am told) a terrific production of Shostakovich's Gogol-based The Nose, opera this year was undistinguished. Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors is doubly handicapped by having been written for children and for TV. An uninspired work, it further suffered from Menotti's awkward stage direction on Christine Edzard's ill-conceived and cramped set. Yves Abel conducted valiantly; Benjamin Hall as the lame boy and Joanna Campion as his anxious mother were good enough: not so the Magi and Pierre Lacotte's vestigial choreography.

Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, fared scarcely better. Alberto Maria Giuri, who won the Festival's annual artistic award, conducted in slow, unravishing fashion; Menotti's stage direction was often bizarre (Onegin arriving for the duel Volga-boatman-like by water; charming old M. Triquet sung by a youngish oaf; elderly Prince Gremin portrayed as no older than Onegin; etc.); and the scenery, by the noted interior decorator Renzo Mongiardino, fell short, especially in the Gremin ball, where the central part of the ballroom was annoyingly hidden by a wall -- perhaps for reasons of economy.

Tatyana Odinikova was a handsome and strong-voiced Tatyana without any Russian-soprano squeakiness, but her robust, aggressively frontal delivery (misdirection?) grew wearying. Svetlana Furdui's nurse was well sung, but the others, particularly the three Scandina- vians in the principal male roles, were disgraceful.

I found Handel's Semele better performed, although baroque opera is one of my b - tes noires. There was noteworthy work from the Jupiter of Tracey Welborn, the Somnus of Denis Sedov, and the stunning Juno of Kristina Hammarstrom, a stylish singer with compelling stage presence, and the possessor of superb English diction.

The one dance event I could catch was the harmlessly silly Forever Tango, an Argentine spectacle by Luis Bravo, wherein imposing tango couples burst on us in increasingly suggestive pairings that nevertheless couldn't quite overcome the limitations of that dance. The musicians, however, and especially the bandoneon players, were sensual and stirring. The sell-out crowds at the well-preserved Roman amphitheater (picturesque but, even with cushions, hard on the culus) lapped it all up indiscriminately.

The main dramatic event was Griffin and Sabine, a stage version of three popular picture books by the British writer - illustrator Nick Bantock. The adapter was Edoardo Ponti, the 23-year-old son of Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren, who simply transcribed these short but fantastical and lushly illustrated books. He also directed on a bare stage, except for a banquette at the center and a screen in back, behind which, quite arbitrarily, one scene was done in shadow play. The two actors were seen singly or together, or just piped in over the PA system. Griffin was an able young black actor from New York, Peter Francis James, who, however, had trouble with his British accent. Sabine -- the mysterious, telepathically endowed beloved from the South Seas -- was Elizabeth Guber, a close friend of Edoardo's from his California film school. Though extremely pretty, she cannot, as of now, either act or properly speak (her Valley-girl accent is a joke), or even be heard as far as the fourth row, where my seat was.

The event was rousingly greeted by the front rows, where sat Signor and Signora Ponti and their friends (the arts being represented by Giorgio Armani and Carla Fendi); it was scoffingly chattered through by the men from the media in the middle rows (though the reviews on the morrow were polite); and it was met with indignation from hoi polloi in the back rows, who could hear little and cared less. The presence of Miss Loren was the sensation of the festival, the media phalanx and the gawkers' multitude joining in ignoring everything else, much to the disgust of the festival regulars.

There was other theater I had to miss, but I caught a production of Friedrich Durrenmatt's wonderful Romulus the Great, performed in the austerely inapposite Church of San Nicolo. Giovanni Pampiglioni's casting and staging were equally misjudged, with Mario Scaccia, a grand old stage actor (so they tell me), proving grandly predictable. A deeply ironic play, Romulus elicited only sporadic, isolated chuckles from a baffled audience, and had me fleeing at the interval.

The life-sized Colla Marionettes from Milan presented as their second program La leggenda di Pocahontas, a more dignified evocation of the recently Disneyfied Indian princess. The marionettes performed nobly and nimbly, with a dozen invisible puppeteers and actors harmoniously animating, speaking, and singing the story, accompanied by a notable, specially composed score. Sets and costumes were pleasingly atmospheric, and I particularly cherish a veristic buffalo stampede and the feast of a flock of vultures on dead British soldiers we previously saw being pierced by arrows in most lifelike, I mean deathlike, fashion.

Not fancying old church music, I skipped the Ora mistica midnight concerts, much praised by those in attendance. I did, however, enjoy the closing orchestral concert, Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, appropriately performed in front of the Duomo, with some five thousand chairs stretching from the square up into the street of stairs leading from it. Steven Mercurio conducted commandingly; the orchestra, barring minor glitches, played appealingly. The young string players even coped with the changes of temperature as day turned into night, as it often does during a Mahler symphony. The soloists sang poorly, but the Festival Choir, augmented by that of the Slovak Philharmonic, proved outstanding. Against the conductor's wishes, the concert began at 8:30 rather than 9, which is bedtime for the countless swallows that crisscross the piazza's air space; they made uncopacetic music that turned Mahler into Stockhausen. By the second movement, though, this nuisance subsided.

It grieves me to say, however, that little of the Festival registered as strongly as the Quintana in the neighboring city of Foligno. For this event, much of the citizenry dons Renaissance costume and marches in procession into the fine new arena where the nocturnal games take place. Foligno's ten districts choose one cavalier each, and these remarkable, costumed horsemen must, in full gallop (they are judged on speed as well as skill), make three charges in each of three rounds to thread a set of rings with their lances. The rings decrease in diameter from ten to eight to six centimeters, and the skill of the contestants is matched by the nobility of their specially trained thoroughbreds. The Palio in Siena may be grander, but the Quintana, with its enthusiastically cheering, often likewise costumed spectators, is scarcely less rousing.

Even in a nonvintage year, there was something matchless about Spoleto, perched on an Umbrian hilltop. The artistic and architectural wonders -- Roman, medieval, Renaissance -- are uplifting enough, but nature will not be outdone, from the muted green of the olive trees to the distant mountains in royal purple. The evening sunlight playing on the arches over the steep, cobblestoned streets is as beautiful as any work of man, and is performed at every sunset, punctually and to perfection.