MUSIC REVIEW : SPANISH TROUPE GIVES ZARZUELA EXCERPTS

Some Spanish exports--sherry, dress fabrics, music for the guitar--travel well. Other products indigenous to the Iberian peninsula-- tapas and zarzuela, for instance--encounter more problems.

The problems with Antologia de la Zarzuela, the 100-plus-member troupe from Madrid now touring the United States, and visiting Ambassador Auditorium through Sunday night, however, are not the exportability of the musical product. Zarzuela, the Spanish operetta form now more than 300 years old, can be appreciated without prior training by Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking Americans alike. Showmanship needs no translator.

But, being an operatic art and one almost always, and crucially, supported by dance, the presentation of zarzuela needs the assistance of a strong and uncompromising musical hand. And ear.

That means a knowing conductor/accompanist and a style-conscious orchestra in the pit, both versed in accomplishing informed acoustical and musical balances. It also means the absence of extraneous or extramusical sounds that might distract.

At the opening-night performance Thursday, the uninformed use of amplification spoiled and distorted the singing, the castanet-playing and the orchestral contributions of a 12-member pit band. One simply could not trust what one was hearing--or reorganize the strange aural perspectives being offered.

The dancing, expert and stylish but in some moments a bit tour-weary, emerged unscathed.

Still, the generous 2 1/2-hour program, offering zarzuela excerpts from stage works written between 1657 and 1936 by composers as diverse as Manuel Parada, Francisco Alonso, Geronimo Gimenez, Jose Serrano and Ruperto Chapi, pleased and seemed to rouse a full house in the 1,200-seat auditorium.

As well it should. Among the more healthy-sounding of the vocal soloists were Josefina Arregui, Pedro Lavirgen, Jovita Gomez, Antonio Ramallo and Carmen Gonzalez. In familiar balletic excerpts from Breton’s “La Dolores,” Penella’s “El Gato Montes” and Gimenez’s “La Boda de Luis Alonso,” the dancers of the ballet displayed exuberance and discipline in equal parts. Jose de Felipe was the solid conductor. And everyone wore his/her colorful costumes with a panache that crossed all boundaries.