HELPING HAND FOR ‘FIGARO’

Mozart’s music is so likable, so entrancing, that it’s easy to overlook the master’s weightier concerns, especially when they are couched in the feverish comic free-for-all of something like “Le Nozze di Figaro. “ When the work is sung in a foreign tongue and by singers who are not fluent in the language, it’s particularly tough for monolingual modern audiences to grasp the more subtle ideas the authors had 200 years ago.

Enter the translator, in this case Andrew Porter, music critic of The New Yorker, who translated the work for the San Diego Opera’s current production, “The Marriage of Figaro.” Was the rakish title character simply a “cheeky, insolent servant” or “a modern, organized revolutionary?” Porter asks.

Obviously, there’s more to it than just fun and fakery, Porter said recently at the opera’s Town Hall lecture series. Developing a credible translation, he said, required not only getting the gist of the original text right but providing English words that are easily singable to help pave the way for those “details of musical declamation.” When a tenor is stretching for a very high note, it helps if the vowel of the word the note is sung on facilitates singing at such a high pitch.

Then there are the less than obvious subtexts like women being placed on pedestals, “with the highest form of respect paid, which is really slavery,” Porter said. He returned to the original Beaumarchais play, which is less subtle in pointing out such concerns as the rights of women and social injustice. Figaro really was a raging revolutionary at heart who rebelled at the aristocracy.

Creating a text in a new language that conveys that kind of information, plus the opera’s major theme of love in its many forms, are some of the problems of providing a translation which, no matter how well conceived, many opera devotees are going to revile because it is not in the original tongue. Porter, who also enjoys opera in the original language, is unmoved, however: “I do not know a single composer who did not want the opera sung in the language of the audience.”

BEETLES, TOO: “Meet the Beetles,” an exhibit that opened last week at the Natural History Museum, has little to do with mop-headed rockers but does offer a look at a cross section from the museum’s collection of a couple million of the little hard-winged coleopterans, along with a second exhibit, “A to Z,” that includes examples of 26 members of the animal world. Next month the museum will return to exhibits featuring local visual artists. Work by Janet Cooling, whose art is on exhibit at the Patty Aande gallery, will have a show from Feb. 21 to March 23.

Paintings by George Matson, a longtime San Diego artist, will be exhibited March 28 to April 27. The largest visual arts show at the Natural History Museum will be the John James Audubon Show, opening June 1. That exhibit, from the Smithsonian Institution, will include paintings and artifacts used by the famed naturalist.

ORGAN PAVILION: San Diego is one of few cities with an outdoor organ. Played at weekly Sunday matinee recitals and summer serenades, it is the largest such instrument in the country. The Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park has been restored in recent years, and the building that houses the huge instrument has been renovated. Now bulldozers are at work completing the last phase of the renewal. The seating area of the pavilion and the surrounding gardens are being landscaped to provide an ambiance as pleasing as the music the instrument produces.

Much of the $900,000 project’s costs will go for removal and rerouting of many of the underground service lines such as sewer, water and gas mains, and the seating area will be terraced so that viewers in the rear seats will have a better view of the stage. About $300,000 is being sought in donations to pay for special six-foot benches. Organ recitals are in abeyance during the landscaping, which may extend through September.

BLACK ARTS: For National Black History Month the San Diego Historical Society will highlight black artists and writers in a series of programs at the Villa Montezuma, 1925 K St. Twenty-five black San Diego artists will be represented in a mixed media exhibit from Sunday through March 30 in the second-floor gallery of the villa, built in 1887 by the eccentric artist Jesse Shepard. Three special events, free and open to the public, will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Sundays in February at the Villa. The society’s Afro-American history committee will host a reception Sunday. On Feb. 16, Hollis Gentry and the Fattburger Band will play a jazz concert, and a poetry reading by members of the Black Artists and Writers Assn. will be held Feb. 23.

MULTICULTURE: Last Friday’s multicultural arts meeting drew representatives of 15 local organizations, including minority artists. Held at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park, the regional meeting was called by Veronica Enrique and Carroll Parrott Blue, both members of the California Arts Council’s Multicultural Advisory Panel. Arts assistance from the city and county arts boards and COMBO, the private, countywide arts funding agency, was discussed. Attendees pledged to go to tonight’s 7 o’clock open meeting at the Recital Hall in Balboa Park, at which public input will be solicited for the City of San Diego’s public arts program.

ARTBEATS: The general director of the San Diego Opera, Ian D. Campbell, will serve as San Diego State University’s first Paul Clarke Stauffer guest professor of music. He will teach “Masterpieces of Grand Opera” beginning Jan. 27. The course is open to the public through the university’s extension program.