WEST SIDE OPERA : DOCUMENTARY RECORDS BERNSTEIN RECORDING

Publicity photos for the starry new “West Side Story” show the Spanish tenor Jose Carreras as the Anglo Tony (more about the anti-typecasting later), clutching the Maori soprano Kiri Te Kanawa as the Puerto Rican Maria to his manly chest.

The relatively mature singers sport the costumes of the teen-age protagonists. Some of the photos place the latter-night Romeo and Juliet behind a chain-link fence, against a background of Manhattan tenements laden with graffiti.

It looks dramatic. It isn’t. The photos are merely intended to hype an extravagant, and extravagantly overblown, new recording by Leonard Bernstein of the musical semi-comedy that conquered Broadway back in 1957 (Deutsche Grammophon CD 415 253-2, LP 415-253-1).

Carreras and Te Kanawa have never performed “West Side Story” on the stage and probably never will. It doesn’t matter. Their names are big names in opera, big names in the canned-music industry.

Bernstein’s name is even bigger. Since he--like his arch-rival, Herbert von Karajan--doesn’t hiccup anymore without having cameras and microphones document the event for a presumably grateful posterity, his first recording of his pretty tale of love and gang wars in the slums has been turned into something of a media circus.

Tonight at 9, as part of the optimistically labeled “Great Performances” series, PBS will offer 90 minutes of this grand-operaticized “West Side Story.” However, viewers mustn’t expect a theatrical performance. At least, they mustn’t expect a theatrical performance involving the Sharks, the Jets and the star-cross’d lovers of New York.

Significantly, the program is entitled “Bernstein Conducts ‘West Side Story.’ ” It is a visual recording of the making of a sonic recording. The focus rests resolutely upon the theatrical performance of the maestro.

Watch Lenny wave a baton. Watch Lenny laugh. Watch Lenny cry. Watch Lenny sweat. Watch Lenny quip. Watch Lenny get petulant. Watch Lenny blow kisses. Watch Lenny rhapsodize. Watch Lenny admit, grudgingly if not self-effacingly, that his talent isn’t quite the same as Mozart’s (KCET/Channel 28, with a stereo simulcast on KUSC; monaural repeat Sunday at 2).

“I can’t get over how funky this piece is,” declares Bernstein at the outset.

“That’s my favorite song in the show,” exclaims Bernstein after the ex-Puerto Rican women sing the satiric praises of “America.”

“He’s brilliant, a genius,” a gushing Te Kanawa confides over and over and over again. She also labels the work “a masterpiece.” The unsolicited testimonials are touching.

Then there are the uplifting benedictions from the podium after each acceptable “take,” many of the accolades echoed via the control-room microphone: “Great! . . . Marvelous! . . . Sensational! . . . Fantastic! . . . Socko!”

Amid the prepackaged euphoria--don’t tell me the participants weren’t conscious of the record buyers out there in televisionland--one can find some music. Much of it is, as we all know, bright, witty and effective. Some of it is lyrical, sweet and affecting. Some of it is mawkish--so mawkish that even Stephen Sondheim’s crisp and clever words can’t help.

None of the music, in any case, is operatic music, and none of it benefits from grandiose, formal delivery and a superabundance of pearly shaped tones.

Te Kanawa may chirp that she “feels pretty,” but she somehow makes the little girl from San Juan sound like a beauteous diva from Rome. Also, she rolls every infernal r.

Bernstein coos in delight as Te Kanawa warbles “Somewhere,” even though this particular performance is a gimmick strictly for television. The song, the property of an off-stage voice in the original show, is allotted to Marilyn Horne on the actual recording. The mezzo must have been busy elsewhere when the cameras were rolling.

Tatiana Troyanos as the temperamental Anita indulges in grotesque, chesty exaggerations that suggest a cross between our friend Erda and a disoriented Bloody Mary.

Jose Carreras sings Tony very sweetly, very intelligently and often rather stylishly. It isn’t his fault that his gentle Hispanic accent makes a mockery of the essential plot conflict.

It is the tenor, incidentally, who gives the documentary one of its few moments of immediacy and truth: He vents frustration and anger when the union calls a halt to one recording session just as he is mastering the linear, rhythmic and verbal quirks of the most demanding passages in “Maria.”

In a neat little flight of cultural nepotism, Bernstein engages his own daughter and son to deliver the dialogue for Te Kanawa and Carreras. Nina Bernstein speaks Maria in American: no rolled r for her. Unlike his musical counterpart, Alexander Bernstein introduces a conversational Tony who has never even heard of Barcelona.

In general, Bernstein encourages his expensive singers to confuse his inexpensive songs with puffy arias. Carol Lawrence, Larry Kert and Chita Rivera did more with less. Apart from a very hasty ode to Officer Krupke, Bernstein enforces a slow-tempo scheme that sentimentalizes what is already sentimental. Succumbing to symphonic pomp, he bloats the simple pit orchestrations he concocted in collaboration with Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal.

Yes, he wrote the music. But that doesn’t give him carte blanche to distort it.

Early in his voice-over narration, the composer recalls that Arthur Laurents agreed to write the book for “West Side Story” on one condition: that the play not--repeat, not--be treated as an opera.

Where is Laurents when we need him?