A Shooting Star With Staying Power : Opera: At 54, Welsh soprano Gwyneth Jones keeps expanding her repertory (she specializes in Wagnerian dramatic roles), and is booked solid for the next five years.

At 54, the eminent Welsh soprano Gwyneth Jones has every right to begin scaling down her repertory and cutting back on professional commitments. But not Jones, who is noted for her Wagnerian dramatic roles.

Jones, who is booked solid for the next five years, keeps expanding her already large repertory and sees retirement only as a distant possibility.

“I think it keeps the career and the person very much awake, fresh and alive if you are always doing new things,” Jones said over coffee at a Costa Mesa hotel recently. “This season, I’ve had three new roles. I did (Schoenberg’s) ‘Erwartung’ for the first time. I just did my first Ortrud in (Wagner’s) ‘Lohengrin’ on stage. . . . And now (Puccini’s) Minnie.”

Minnie is the pistol-packing heroine-saloon keeper of “La Fanciulla del West,” which plays today and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, then moves to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on June 12-23. The 1978 production, from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is a first-time collaboration for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, the Orange County Center and the Costa Mesa-based Opera Pacific. Placido Domingo, artistic consultant to LAMCO, will sing the role of the outlaw Dick Johnson in Costa Mesa and Los Angeles.

Jones said she was drawn to the role after seeing Domingo sing “Fanciulla” in Berlin. At a post-performance party she promised him that “if I get asked, when you’re doing it, then I will learn it specially. And lo and behold, then Los Angeles Opera came up and asked me to do this,” she said.

The timing wasn’t particularly great, however. Jones was committed to singing Isolde in Vienna and Berlin and had to cancel “a whole row of performances” to make the dates in Orange County and Los Angeles, she said. “But I just moved Heaven and Earth to make myself available to do this.”

Partly she felt obligated because of her promise to Domingo, and partly because she “found it such a wonderful idea to do (“Fanciulla”) in California where it was meant to be playing,” she said.

While she is in Los Angeles, Jones will take time out on Sunday to present soprano Kallen Esperian, 29, with a $25,000 check and a bronze statuette for a 1991 Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award. Jones said she has not heard the young singer, nor met her. “I was asked to present the prize,” she said. “So I’m going to.”

In the back of her mind, Jones, however, has some cautions for Esperian and other young, talented singers.

“I find it alarming to see so many really good young people coming up and suddenly then they’re gone again,” she said. “The number of singers that have come up like shooting stars and then disappeared again during my career is horrific. The problem is to allow this talent to grow and develop so that they have a healthy career.

“There are many more opera houses today than there used to be and most of these houses want to play all the big pieces, which they didn’t used to do. And so of course, there just are not enough singers to go around for them all. The result is that quite a lot of the small houses are persuading young people into doing these roles too soon, and this is very dangerous. . . .

“When I was starting my career (in the early ‘60s) and I was singing Rhinemaidens and Valkyries, Birgit Nilsson was the Brunnhilde of the day. Probably nobody would have thought that the second Rhinemaiden was going to turn out to be a Brunnhilde later. So one should just give these young people more time to develop so that they have longer, healthier careers.”

It is advice which she followed herself and to which she attributes her long career. At the beginning of her career, Jones studied repertory with Luigi Ricci, “who had been Puccini’s personal assistant for eight years.”

“I studied all my Italian roles with him,” she said. “He warned me not to sing ‘Fanciulla’ because Puccini himself had said that it was a very demanding and dangerous role. But now that I’ve sung all the heavy roles like Elektra, Isolde, Brunnhilde and Turandot . . . I feel much more able to cope with it.”

To compound her difficulties, Jones also had suffered through a long period of vocal problems, she said, as a result of whiplash from an auto accident in 1969 that dislocated the top vertebra of her spine.

“It meant that the voice, whilst (the vertebra) was out of place, had a kind of a little flutter in it,” she said. “My head was always kind of on the side, and so it meant that all the muscles on this one side became undergrown and on the other became overgrown.

“It was out of place, actually, for seven years. I had constant headaches and dizzy spells. . . . The doctors said I was very lucky to be alive because it was so bad. A fraction more, and that would have been it.”

Eventually, a doctor in London was able to correctly diagnose the problem by taking X-rays through her open mouth “with a long zoom camera.”

“You could just then see (the vertebra) was displaced,” she said, “and then he just had to put it back into place. As soon as it was put back right again, then the flutter was gone because then suddenly everything was back in the right place.”

An inveterate optimist, nonetheless she tried to turn the problem to her advantage. “Out of something bad, I always try to find something good,” she said. “Trying to find out what was causing the problem made me work even a thousand times harder on my vocal technique. So I profited from the work that I did.”

She profited to the extent that, given her already naturally large and vibrant voice, some critics consider Jones the only Wagnerian dramatic soprano. She is reluctant to accede to that judgment. “That’s up to other people to say,” she said. “It’s very difficult to say something about myself.

“There never, ever has been a lot of Wagner singers,” she added. “There never have been rows of Siegfrieds and Brunnhildes and Tristans. It is a difficult repertoire, and there just has not ever been many of them.”

Further, she doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. “I don’t like to be called just a Wagnerian soprano because I’ve always been a person who sings a variety of roles,” she said.

With bookings secure through 1996, Jones says retirement, at the moment, is out of the question.

“People and critics are all saying that I’m better now than ever,” she said, “that I’m in really fantastic form, and obviously as long as I’m in fantastic form and health physically and in every way, then there’s no reason to think of retiring.

“Having said that, certainly, when the time would come, and I would be the first to know, if I felt in any way vocally that it was kind of slipping or that things were no longer easy, then I would no longer want to sing if I was no longer on top. Then I would probably want to pass on everything that I learned. I would want to teach.”

* Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” today at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, then the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion June 12-23. Information: (714) 556-2787 or (213) 972-7211.