MUSIC / DANCE NEWS : Premiere of Krenek’s First Opera

Ernst Krenek’s first opera, “Der Sprung uber den Schatten” (The Leap Over the Shadow), will have its U.S. premiere Jan. 27 in the first of six performances by the UC Santa Barbara Opera Theatre.

The opera, written for a production in Frankfurt in 1924, will be performed in the composer’s English translation of his own text, made shortly before his death in 1991.

“The Leap Over the Shadow” is a comic opera that foreshadows the style of his spectacularly successful “Jonny spielt auf” of 1927. One German critic summed it up: “A joyful mixture of free atonality and fox-trot, low-class operetta style and neobaroque fugue: The music dances between ‘Rosenkavalier’ and the revolutionary, between Romanticism and Revue.”

Michael Ingham, artistic director of the Opera Theatre, will conduct the performances on Jan. 27-29 and Feb. 3-5 in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall. Sterling Branton is stage director, Rebecca Stenn the choreographer.

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OLYMPIAD: Six concerts by the Atlanta Symphony, performances of the Gershwins’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1931 show “Of Thee I Sing” and an operatic program are part of the preliminary plans for an Olympic Arts Festival in connection with the 1996 Games in Atlanta.

Yoel Levi, music director of the orchestra, will lead five of its six concerts, which will include one American program and Mahler’s Second Symphony (with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus). In addition, the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra will give a joint performance with the Australian Youth Orchestra.

Concerts will take place at Symphony Hall in the Woodruff Arts Center, which will serve as primary site for Cultural Olympiad orchestra activities, July 14 to Aug. 4, 1996.

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APPOINTMENTS: Stephen Belth, senior director of marketing and communications at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will become director of marketing and communications at the Chicago Symphony, effective next month. . . . Chosen from a field of 170 candidates, Richard F. Odell has been named president of the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. Odell will take office Feb. 1, replacing Dean Boal, who is retiring.

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POTPOURRI: Responding to a steady stream of anti-opera invective by syndicated columnist Dave Barry, the Eugene (Ore.) Opera has invited Barry to join the cast of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi,” opening tonight. The humorist will portray Buoso Donati, the recently deceased uncle of a family who spends most of the opera dividing up their inheritance. Buoso Donati, of course, is a non-singing role. . . .

For the second time in this decade, the music department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has taken first prize in the chamber music category of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers awards for adventuresome programming of contemporary music. Dorrance Stalvey, director of music programs at LACMA, will accept the award at a ceremony Friday in San Francisco. . . .

Baritone Earle Patriarco, a native of Los Angeles and a 1994 San Francisco Opera Center Adler Fellow, has won first prize in the Birgit Nilsson International Vocal Competition in New York; Patriarco earned $10,000 and a contract to sing with Stockholm Opera. . . .

Three Californians are among the nine composers selected for 1994 Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard commissions: Stephen Hartke of Glendale, Arthur Jarvinen of Sylmar and Chen Yi of San Francisco. The other winners: Matthew Greenbaum of Philadelphia, Ellen Harrison of Cleveland, Stephen Hicken of Tallahassee, Fla., David Liptak of Rochester, N.Y., and Ursula Mamlok and Bruce Taub of New York. . . .

The 10-member Lewitzky Dance Co. opens the winter season at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert on Monday night at 8. The repertory: Bella Lewitzky’s “Meta 4” (1994), Susan Rose’s “Displacements” (1993) and Lewitzky’s “Spaces Between 3” (1974).