RESTORATION.(management of Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England)

English audiences produce an unmistakable noise at the end of a great night of theatre--a revved-up, rapid-fire applause that is almost caffeinating in its effect. That noise erupted after a recent performance of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, and it was a welcome sound, since England's leading opera company has too long been known as the place where everything goes wrong. In the nineties, as the rest of London enjoyed a cultural renaissance, Covent Garden dwelled in a state of chaos, each new cultural or bureaucratic horror sprayed across the morning papers. Executives came and went; productions were cancelled or curtailed on short notice; extensive renovations sucked up millions of pounds of public money; Labour politicians self-servingly denounced the house on behalf of the working class; and the London tabloids mocked the entire spectacle ("The Greedy Beggar's Opera," the Sun dubbed it). Several ugly backstage scenes, complete with screaming, swearing, and the hurling of a telephone, were broadcast to the nation via a merciless television documentary entitled "The House." At one point, it seemed possible that the Royal Opera and Ballet would simply go under.

This season, Covent Garden is a happier and healthier place. The critics are full of praise, and the tabloids have let up on their needling. The solution, oddly simple on the face of it, was to hire a powerful artistic personality around whom the company's energies could coalesce. The new music director, Antonio Pappano, is one of the best all-around conductors of opera now working; unless the byzantine management structure makes a victim of him, he ought to have a long and happy reign. The house that rode so high under Georg Solti's direction in the nineteen-sixties once again has the swagger of success.

Pappano is forty-two years old; he was born in London and spent much of his youth in Connecticut. He got his start as a rehearsal coach at the New York City Opera but soon moved to European stages, gaining precious hands-on experience in Frankfurt. From 1992 until this year, he was the music director of the perennially adventurous Theatre Royale de la Monnaie, in Brussels. He has a pleasant, soft-featured face and speaks in a flat-toned American accent that can only be described as pure Washington, D.C. Padding around Covent Garden in slacks and a green Lacoste shirt, he has no air of grandiloquence about him. He even seems a little bland. But when he speaks about his plans for Covent Garden he assumes the air of someone who has decided what he wants and has no time to argue.

"My job is to be a point of focus for this incredible community of artists and art-minded people," he told me, in his not yet fully furbished Covent Garden office. "They need to funnel all their talents in one direction, rather than in twenty directions at once. This is what Covent Garden has lacked in the recent past. All that infighting you read about was just filling a vacuum. At the same time, my job is to provide flash points for the audience--dramatic moments where the music and the image come together as one. I'd like to work with directors who challenge cliches without going to conceptual extremes."

The new "Wozzeck," directed by Keith Warner, with sets designed by Stefanos Lazaridis, was a model display of Pappano's philosophy. Purists could advance any number of criticisms of this wholesale revision of Berg's opera, in which an unlucky soldier is driven insane by military discipline and medical experiments. At the start of Warner's scenario, Wozzeck is already cooped up in a gruesome white-walled asylum, and it seems as though he is telling his story in flashback. The images are vague and disorienting, but they strike home in uncanny ways. We see an assortment of objects--models of houses, mushrooms, other nameless organic matter--sealed up in Damien Hirst-like glass tanks. One of them contains nothing but water. When Wozzeck kills his wife, Marie, holding her over the tank, the water turns red. Then, at the moment where the libretto calls for him to drown in a river, Wozzeck climbs into the tank and submerges himself entirely. ...