PERFORMING ARTS : What Becomes a <i> Buffo </i> Most? : The answer: Playing him straight, say Claudio Desderi and Michael Gallup, who share the comic title role in L.A. Opera’s “Don Pasquale.”

Claudio Desderi and Michael Gallup may hail from far-flung spots on the globe-- Florence, Italy, and Compton, Calif., to be exact--but they speak the same language when it comes to playing Italian comic opera’s great buffo roles.

The trick, they say, is to avoid the shtick.

“I like to play the humanity of a character,” says Gallup, seated in a Dorothy Chandler Pavilion office with a grand view of the construction site that has yet to sprout the financially troubled Disney Hall. “I don’t like to go for funny effects for their own sake.

“If something funny happens to the character, fine,” Gallup continues. “But I would rather play him as a human being to whom funny things are happening than overtly for a laugh. If you play the happiness plus the darkness, it gives it a larger range.”

His colleague from across the sea agrees. “I like (to play) the human side, (to give it) a real modern interpretation, not (one in the) old-fashioned tradition of buffo ,” says Desderi, speaking by phone from a tour stop in Chicago, where he frequently performs for the Lyric Opera.

“With a comic opera, if you play what is real, because the situation is comic, it becomes comic. If you play it as comic, it becomes farce. It’s better to (emphasize) the real and credible sides in a comic opera.”

Desderi and Gallup’s like-minded strategies will soon be put to the test. They share the title role in L.A. Music Center Opera’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” which opens with a matinee on Saturday. Desderi will sing that performance as well as those on March 21, 23, 26 and 29; Gallup takes over for the April 1 matinee. The production will be conducted by Evelino Pido and directed by Stephen Lawless.

With this role in particular, both singers say they will be looking far beyond the buffo.

“ ‘Don Pasquale’ is comic, but it’s not merely that,” says the Florence-based Desderi, who’s also the artistic director of Pisa’s Teatro Comunale. “It’s hard to say that it’s only a buffo role.”

Pasquale, like Shakespeare’s King Lear, is “more sinned against than sinning.”

“It’s pretty tragic what happens to him,” says Gallup. “It’s just so sad that you couldn’t play anything else.”

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“Don Pasquale,” which was first performed in 1843, sits squarely within the genre of Italian comic opera, or opera buffa . Its characters are, for the most part, exaggerations--stock heroes and heroines and villains--and its situations farcical.

Donizetti’s work, Desderi points out, “is the last example of a tradition of Neapolitan music after (Giovanni Battista) Pergolesi”--the early 18th-Century composer who was a founder of the comic style.

“ ‘Don Pasquale’ is probably the last comic opera,” Desderi says, “the last example of true opera buffa .”

The story, indeed, is a classic of the genre. In “Don Pasquale,” a cranky old man decides to marry in order to disinherit his nephew, who has chosen a bride the old man disapproves of. The nephew and his fiancee respond by hatching a plot in cahoots with the nasty Dr. Malatesta, tricking Pasquale into a mock marriage with a seemingly sweet girl fresh from the convent.

But once the vows are spoken, the bride--who is really the nephew’s fiancee in disguise-- transforms into an extravagant hussy bent on humiliating her new husband. When events make it clear that she also much prefers the company of his nephew, the old man, desperate for escape, is happy to hand her over.

Don Pasquale and other buffo characters have been signature roles for bass-baritone Desderi, who has sung in major opera houses all over the world. Now 51, he was born into a musical family in Florence, Italy, and graduated in 1965 from the Florence Conservatory, where he studied voice with his mother, singer Andreina Desderi Rissone

In the late 1960s, he made his professional debut; “Don Pasquale” marks his L.A. Opera debut. He will also appear as Don Alfonso in next season’s company revival of Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte.”

If Desderi seems to have been fated to sing, Gallup’s career was never a foregone conclusion. “The closest thing we have to anything musical in my family is that my mother used to play accordion,” he says of his early years in Compton.

Gallup, now 49, began acting and taking voice lessons (“probably too early,” he says) in high school, before studying music at Cal State Long Beach. He turned professional in 1971 and has frequently performed in San Diego, Portland and elsewhere. He also has been an L.A. Opera regular since the company was launched nine seasons ago, and his recent roles have included Dr. Bartolo in “Le Nozze di Figaro” and Trinity Moses in “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.”

Both singers seem to relish portraying the scorned Don Pasquale. And both say the role’s appeal comes in part from how accessible and recognizable he is for audiences.

The Don’s failings are not uncommon ones, they point out. He is a bit of a Scrooge, but mostly he is a vain old fool.

“Don Pasquale is a bourgeois person who thinks he can offer a woman a solid personal situation,” says Desderi. “He thinks that’s enough for a normal happy life, but he realizes in the end that that was only a dream.”

“He’s a man proud of himself,” Desderi continues. “He is old but not stupid. He is still (young) enough to fall in love with a young girl, and his humiliation at the end is a real one.”

And everyone can respond to the sad side of this putatively comic curmudgeon. “He realizes probably that it was the last chance to have some human emotion,” says Desderi of Pasquale’s sorrow upon discovering his bride’s true colors. “Everything is destroyed at that moment. That’s the humanity of the character.”

When Pasquale’s fortunes turn, it’s reflected in the music. “After he’s been slapped, there’s a wonderful plaintive tune,” says Gallup. “If you tried to play against the sadness of the text and music, it would destroy the piece.”

Because the drama swings between light and dark, portraying Pasquale requires the exercise of a number of different artistic muscles. That too, is part of the role’s appeal. “The usual conception of buffo is that it’s for older gentlemen who are losing their voice and have only acting abilities left,” says Gallup. “That’s wrong. You have to sing it as well as you act it.”

There was a time, of course, when opera singers weren’t expected to display the naturalistic thespian skills that they need today. “Back in the 19th Century, (singers) were just huge people who stood and sang and the voice was everything,” says Gallup.

But mass media have altered audience and critical expectations. “Now, because we have television and video, we have people demanding that (singers) look believable onstage as the character,” says Gallup. “If somebody is dying of consumption or has been starving, you want somebody who isn’t a 250-pound man or woman up there.

The acting may also make the opera more accessible to the uninitiated--especially when the music includes such unfamiliar devices as the rapid-fire “patter” songs often found in opera buffa.

“The big challenge in a lot of the buffo roles are the patter arias, when a lot of words go by very quickly in a short amount of time,” says Gallup. “It’s especially difficult for a non-Italian to pronounce those Italian words so quickly.”

The patter, though, also has a dramatic purpose and good acting can always make that clear.

“Usually, (the patter song) shows either great anger or great happiness,” says Gallup. “The (conspirators) decide to show how foolish (Pasquale) is, so they make up this fake bride. As soon as the contract is signed, she turns into an absolute harridan and starts ordering him around. He finally just has enough, and he bursts out in this patter song.”

Pasquale’s capitulation is, of course, one of his most emotionally recognizable moments. “It helps the whole art form if people can identify with what they see on the stage,” says Gallup. “(People can think) ‘I’ve been betrayed, I’ve had a love like this, I’ve almost felt like killing somebody because of jealousy, lust’ and all this.”

* “Don Pasquale,” L.A. Music Center Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Saturday (Desderi) and April 1 (Gallup), 1 p.m.; March 21, 23, 26 and 29 (all Desderi), 8 p.m. $21-$115. (213) 365-3500 .