Thomas Allen’s Different Take on ‘Figaro’s’ Count : Opera: The British baritone will emphasize ‘how weak and foolish’ the infamous Mozart character is in tonight’s Pavilion performance.

Don’t look just for the cunning malefactor when Thomas Allen sings Count Almaviva tonight at the Pavilion, opening Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” courtesy of the Music Center Opera.

Nor the aristocrat with the supercilious air, nor the arch deceiver, nor any other stock version of 18th-Century nobility lording it over the servants of his household.

“What I have in mind,” says the British baritone who has been delving into Mozartean characters for two decades, “is something different, an attempt to emphasize how weak and foolish the Count is against the strength of Figaro.

“If it succeeds, no one will mistake what is fundamentally disturbing about a world where one man’s birthright entitles him to first-night privileges with another’s bride.”

Sipping coffee in a Music Center conference room, Allen boasts a ruggedly handsome look. But earlier, at a rehearsal, he had pushed himself to the brink of buffoonery--as a pop-eyed Count scurrying behind a chair in Susanna’s room, terrified that his seduction attempt would be discovered.

It is this irony, he insists--the lord of the manor as a frightened fop--that must come across.

“There is a gloom over the comic surface,” he says, “because everyone knows that the Count, a person of no merit, exerts supreme power over them all. And that’s what is so appalling--the defeat of the little man (Figaro), the tragedy of class struggle. It’s the key to the progression of the opera.”

It’s also the exciting part for the 44-year-old Allen, who has often performed the role of Figaro. He prefers to sing the Count, though, “because it’s more challenging vocally and the character has more dimensions and is more complicated--Figaro being the stock-in-trade straight man, rational and heroic.”

The production, which originated in Chicago two years ago with Peter Hall directing, is new to Allen, but it resembles another Hall staging at Glyndebourne in which he sang Figaro.

“On the face of it every ‘Figaro’ is the same,” says the singer who is a stalwart of London’s Royal Opera, as well a frequent guest in Milan, Munich and Paris. “The geography (staging) stays pretty much the same. It’s the chemistry in the middle that changes.”

Curiously, Allen knew nothing of the opera literature as a student at London’s Royal College of Music.

“Snobbism reigned there,” he says, laughing at the purist attitudes of those who hold art songs far and away superior to the spectacle of opera. “In fact, I was a Lied singer full stop until, quite by accident, I was enlisted to replace the Marquis in ‘Traviata.’

“The next day a professor who heard about my hasty debut chided me for putting on the greasepaint. He told me there was an Italian tenor by the name of Gigli who couldn’t even read music. And I laughed, too, being the same kind of snob who had devoted himself to ‘legitimate’ music and hardly recognized opera’s legends.”

But since then Allen, who was made a commander of the British Empire last year, has managed to keep the two careers going simultaneously, thinking through his roles with the same kind of scrutiny he gives to Schubert Lieder. One complements the other, he says.

“Most people end up on the opera stage simply because they can sing ‘Three Blind Mice’ more beautifully than anyone else. But that’s just the beginning. Inevitably, canaries must become actors and we’re living in a time that’s healthy for such development.”

The extra burden carried by opera singers, according to Allen, is that they’re tied to the music. Whereas an actor need concern himself solely with his own words, performers of the lyric muse must pay attention to pitch, to conductors’ tempi, to all sorts of distractions.

Through all this he manages to keeps a balanced attitude toward the vagaries of his art:

“Sometimes I know going in that with only two days of rehearsal there’s no time to explore a role or put it in context of other cast members. It becomes a matter of earning a livelihood. Other times, like this happy one, provide a creative opportunity.”

Six months ago Allen signed a contract with the Berlin Philharmonic and Seiji Ozawa to sing “Carmina Burana” on New Year’s Eve, an assignment he was “unenthusiastic about.”

But the dividends--being in that West German city at its historic moment--turned out to be far greater than what he bargained for.

“When the concert ended at 7,” he says, “I went directly to the Brandenburg Gate to chisel out my own little piece of the wall. It was the most exciting night I can remember. Amid the noisy, drunken happiness--people falling off and climbing up (the Wall), the constant sound of hammering--was an extraordinary event.

“You have to trust in serendipity.”