IN BOVARY MODE SOPRANO VANESS PROVIDES BALANCE TO 'RONDINE'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

There's nothing especially flighty about Carol Vaness' title performance in Giacomo Puccini's ``La Rondine'' (``The Swallow'').

Like the opera itself, the Southern California soprano's interpretation is weighted with a certain maturity and worldliness that keeps this swooning meditation on doomed love and social hypocrisy firmly grounded, even when its melodies soar. Though her singing possesses the dreamy, girlish sensuality the role demands, Vaness, a frequent Los Angeles Opera attraction, effectively balances those qualities with a more sophisticated form of midlife desperation, in the Madame Bovary mode.

First performed in 1917, ``La Rondine'' celebrates the jaded world of the European upper-middle classes, particularly those content to suck the pleasurable dregs of hedonism on the eve of their own destruction.

Beautiful, love-starved Magda de Civry (Vaness), headstrong mistress of the rich, manipulative banker Rambaldo (the imposing baritone William Parcher), presides over a narrow circle of bored Paris salonistas. They kill time with dinner parties and gossip or by puffing on hookahs, the better to feed their amorous intoxications.

When the handsome young Ruggero Lastouc (tenor Marcus Haddock) steps out of Magda's poetic fantasies and into her well-appointed house, the stage is set for a kept woman's cruel disillusionment and downfall.

Director Marta Domingo's remounting of her Washington Opera production revels in the story's richly embroidered decadence. An air of nostalgic bravura clings to the production, particularly the famous Act 2 concertato, ``Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso'' (``I drink to your ravishing smile''), set against the dazzling backdrop of a Paris dance hall.

But while looking backward, ``La Rondine'' also peers ahead toward new musical and artistic horizons. Its impressionistic shadings and Debussian evanescences, mixed with its old-fashioned waltzes and crowd-pleasing Puccini tunes, hint at the more elliptical sounds that were sweeping European concert halls.

French conductor Emmanuel Villaume's firm but unpushy baton work shapes and clarifies these blurrier musical colors, while Alan Burrett's diffuse lighting design acts as a softening agent on Michael Scott's gorgeously precise period sets and costumes. Both visually and aurally, the production has the creamy orderliness of a John Singer Sargent painting.

``La Rondine'' counterposes the star-crossed Magda and Ruggero with the comic squabbling of Magda's high-spirited housemaid Lisette (soprano Sari Gruber) and Lisette's unlikely lover, the poet-singer Prunier (Greg Fedderly). Well paired, Gruber's impetuous charm mingles smoothly with Fedderly's lofty ardor and self-deprecating humor.

Yet it isn't until Act 3, when Magda and Ruggero have run off to their Cote d'Azur love nest, that Vaness and Haddock fully establish their own all-important romantic chemistry. Haddock's vocal intertwining of strength, tenderness and yearning restlessness proves a good mate to Vaness' anxious passion.

But Domingo's direction is at times awkwardly melodramatic. In the lovers' first encounter, she contrives for Haddock to plant his feet and spread his arms like a statue, while Vaness feverishly strokes the screen separating them. At Ruggero's final leave-taking, Vaness flings herself against a column at the couple's seaside retreat.

Yet the production's exquisite final moments evince the psychological subtlety missing elsewhere. When Vaness wades slowly into a sea of dry ice and the music ebbs solemnly, you can hear the audience's appreciative hush - a recognition that beauty, like tragedy, is often best served by understatement.

THE FACTS

--What: ``La Rondine.''

--Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

--When: Performances at 7:30 p.m. today, April 25, 29, May 2 and 5; and 1 p.m. Saturday.

--Tickets: $27 to $146. Call [phone].

--Our rating: Three stars

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo: Carol Vaness offers a sophisticated turn as Magda in Puccini's ``La Rondine.''

Box: THE FACTS (see text)