PETER HALL: PRESENT AT THE CREATION

Sir Peter Hall--diarist, administrator, ex-musician, and, not least, stage director--is in Los Angeles on a theatrical busman’s holiday: working while putting some distance between himself and his controversies back in Britain.

It’s as if the 56-year-old head of London’s National Theatre, in Los Angeles to stage the Music Center Opera’s new production of Richard Strauss’ “Salome,” (opening tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion) actually finds diversion in guest-directing what he calls a “simple” opera--one that employs an often thunderous 90-piece orchestra and features the title character in an necrophiliac pas de deux with a severed head.

“Really, I enjoy the challenge of getting the opera back to the original play (written by Oscar Wilde in 1893),” said Hall. “Anytime I can come to America and really do something good, it’s like a holiday.”

Also, he added, getting a break from the controversy swirling around him in London--where the Sunday Times has alleged that Hall had “obscenely profited” from the National Theatre production of “Amadeus” and the director has sued the newspaper for libel in reply--was more than welcome.

Whether Hall and his cast have succeeded with their brand-new “Salome” remains to be seen, but certainly the quick laugh and easy conversation--stolen during an hour’s break from a “Salome” dress rehearsal--seem to demonstrate Hall’s current state of relaxation.

“I’m amazed at how this place has grown up,” he said. “When I first came here, it was Hollywood, film and little else. Now . . . there’s everything. Even opera--for now.”

Hall said there was no particular reason why he chose Los Angeles for his U.S. production debut (operas staged by him have been imported, but never produced here), other than the fact that “Peter (Hemmings, executive director of Music Center Opera) told me I could have as much rehearsal time as I needed. He really sold me on the place.”

(Hall’s “Salome” got four weeks of rehearsal time, in both the Shrine Auditorium and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, compared to four for the season-opening “Otello” and two for the imported production of “Madama Butterfly.”)

For opera to be established here in Los Angeles (“I can’t understand what took so long, really,” he mused) was yet another proof for Hall, an internationally recognized--if occasionally reviled--opera and stage director, that there is what he perceives as an “awakening” to opera, and its dramatic side, in this country.

“The audiences here, especially in New York, demand great singing--there’s no point in getting over-serious about it. And I agree: If you said to me, ‘Right, you’ve got to choose between great music or great drama in a given opera performance,’ I’d reply, ‘Well, I’ll go to a concert performance, or listen to it at home on record.’

“But at the same time, in this sophisticated day and age, it’s expected that you’ll try to make it legitimate drama as well,” Hall continued. “And luckily, there’s a whole new generation of singers who have very different dramatic attitudes than singers 30 years ago. I’ve seen it change radically in the 30 years, God help me, that have passed since I directed my first opera.”

“Salome,” with its dark currents of sexuality and moral decay set against the biblical setting, is an especially challenging opera to craft dramatically, Hall said.

“I’ve been dying to do a new production of it,” he added. “It’s the great post-’Tristan’ orgasm, isn’t it? But in a way I don’t want to talk about it--I want you to come and see it. But I will say that with any work of art you go to reinterpret, you must present it as it is, there in the text, not in the tradition of the text. That’s what we’ve tried to do with Mr. Wilde’s little comedy.”

Hall made no mention of the new production’s alleged nude scene (or scenes)--”You’ll have to come see,” he said coyly--but did offer a word or two about the difficulties of making the opera “really work .”

“Opera has got to be the most difficult thing in the world to get right,” he said. “To get together all things that make opera work--the right design, the right lighting, the right costumes, the right collaboration of conductor and director and the right group of singers that are capable of acting . . . it’s just impossible. I don’t see how it works; in fact I would say that, a lot of the time, opera doesn’t work. But it remains popular because there are so many people who know that when it does work, it’s the most acute theatrical experience ever known.”