Christianne Rushton & cast of “L’Enfant et les Sortilè ges” (bottom). Photos by Nan Melville.

For its fall presentation, the Juilliard Opera Center (JOC), at the Juilliard School, paired short works by two of France’s leading Post-Romantic composers, concerning less-than-obedient offspring, but ending happily. The December 10 second of three performances of Claude Debussy’s Prix de Rome-winning cantata “L’Enfant Prodigue,” with words by Edouard Guinand, and Maurice Ravel and novelist Colette’s opera “L’ Enfant et les Sortilèges” is considered here. Effectively guiding and helping to realize the double bill were conductor Yves Abel, Music Director of L’Opéra Français de New York, and stage director Lillian Groag, the actress and playwright.

Calculated to win the prestigious Paris Conservatoire prize, Debussy’s lush score for his early work, based on the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), bears more resemblance (intentionally) to Jules Massenet’s operas than to the spare idiom familiar from the later songs and “Pelléas et Mélisande,” Debussy’s only true, completed opera. Groag and set designer John Conklin’s “L’ Enfant Prodigue” was more semi-staged than fully staged, with the three soloists singing from individual platforms and emoting in isolation from each other and, per Maline Casta’s dictates, garbed more in formal attire than costume. In the often excerpted “Air de Lia” (“L’ année en vain chasse l’année!”), which comes right at the start, Melissa Shippen, as Lia, yearned with intensity for her long-lost son in a soprano with a dark, mezzo-like core. One would like to hear her in other roles as well. Singing in the sort of tightly focused, high lyric tenor that works so well in the French repertoire, Javier Abreu, as Azaël, suffered graphically as he regretted his profligate life. Mother and son blended voices in a reunion duet as impassioned as any soprano-tenor operatic duet. As a Siméon with a full, round baritone, Museop Kim joyously announced the return of his prodigal son. The cantata ended with an exultant trio-with-chorus, praising God’s wonders.

Melissa Shippen & Javier Abreu in “L’Enfant Prodigue”

In Ravel’s second and last opera—“L’Heure Espagnole” is the other—animals and objects turn on the rambunctious child who has hurt and broken them, but soften when he bandages the paw of a squirrel, wounded in the mêlée. Groag resisted the Disney approach and emphasized menace over cuteness, presenting the anthropomorphized creatures and furniture, crockery and so on, come to life, as such adult “threats” as nightclub denizens, armed soldiers, crazy folks and, more benignly, show biz hoofers and courtly dancers.

Lyric mezzo-soprano Christianne Rushton immediately established l’enfant as a bratty child, who sticks a pencil in his nose and tears upholstery, wall paper and pages of books in lieu of completing his homework. Mezzo-soprano Ronnita Miller played his exasperated mother. The others, when introduced, wore tuxedos and white masks and held props—miniature chairs, grandfather clock and fireplace, and oversized cup, teapot and cat mask—representing who they were. They later sported headgear or carried canes, shepherds’ crooks, etc. appropriate to their roles.

Jeremy Little and Tammy Coil, as the damaged feisty teapot and lilting Chinese cup, who waved a teabag in the child’s face, wore casts on leg and arm, respectively, and did a soft shoe, devised by choreographer Jeanne Slater, to their fox-trot melody. Daniel Billings and Leah Edwards, in powdered wigs, as chairs the boy tore into, and Sasha Cooke and Lauren Criddle, as a shepherd and shepherdess ripped from the wallpaper, danced stately dances as they bemoaned their fate to quasi-18^th century strains. Matthew Worth, as the clock, ran around clutching his severed pendulum. Women in white coats came after Amy Shoremount, an avenging, spear-carrying fire, with a strait jacket after her wild torrents of coloratura. Dancers playing “le Sommeil” (sleep) and “la Nuit” (night) bodily hoisted up lyric soprano Katherine White, the exotic Princess torn from a story book, mid-note and spirited her away. Tenor Matthew Garrett, as Arithmetic, led the child and random numbers from shredded textbook pages, in a dizzying dance.

The cats, Isabel Leonard and bare-chested Paul LaRosa, performed a slinky, sensual seduction dance to their meowing duet. Returning as the dragonfly, Coil was a torch singer, lamenting her missing mate before an old fashioned microphone, until he was, gruesomely, wheeled out, pinned to the wall by the malicious child. Matthew Boehler and others, as trees the boy had stabbed, were soldiers, wearing helmets, with branches as camouflage, and carrying rifles, reminding of the impact that World War I had on the opera’s creators. Jeanette Baxter, Jeffrey Behrens and Talya Smilowitz took the other parts.

JOC’s next offering will be Bedrich Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride,” in English, on April 27 and 29 and May 1, matinee, 2005.

Juilliard Theater, Lincoln Center

155 West 65^th Street

Tickets $20 212/769-7406