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Arts & Entertainment Preview - July 1997 B Y   A U S T I N   B A E R The Lincoln Center Festival '97 "Festival '96 Gives Itself a Preliminary Grade: A-Plus." So read the headline in The New York Times last August when the final curtain rang down on Lincoln Center's brave new bash. In three jam-packed weeks 83,000-plus paying customers had sampled sixty-four music, dance, and theatrical attractions that ranged from the exalted to the exasperating, the fabulous to the fatuous, the grand to the grandiose. Maybe the grade should have been an A-minus. In the final accounting ticket sales fell some 2,000 units and $300,000 below conservative projections. Still, John Rockwell, the former Times arts critic turned impresario, had proved that the public was hungry not just for light classics on the Great Lawn or Shakespeare under the stars but for an international cultural bazaar on the order of the standard-setting Salzburg and Edinburgh. The decision of the powers that be at Lincoln Center to extend their commitment to the festival through the year 2000 cannot have been hard to reach. Now Rockwell faces the challenge of his first encore, which needs to spark the same excitement as last year's festival, by new means (July 8-27; for more information call 212-875-5928 or visit the Lincoln Center Festival 97 Web site). Palestrina Plus The crown jewel in the festival's musical component is the first-ever joint visit to the United States by London's Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and its sister troupe, the Royal Ballet. True music lovers rarely attend ballet for musical pleasure, but Benjamin Britten's Prince of the Pagodas (July 18, 19, 29), afflicted with book problems, is blessed with a gorgeous score one encounters all too rarely.   The Prince of the Pagodas The unlikely operatic contribution is no less unusual: the anti-modernist cult item Palestrina (1917), by Hans Pfitzner, which makes its point by way of doctrinal quarrels within the sixteenth-century Catholic Church over the use of polyphony in sacred music (July 21, 24, 26). This summer's performances, featuring a top-drawer cast led by the masterly Christian Thielemann, should make the most compelling case for the score that we are likely to encounter for many a season. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offers an all-Pfitzner evening (July 23), while two programs devoted to Wagnerism and its countercurrents, by the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, put his aesthetic into a broader context (July 12, 14, 19, 20). Meanwhile, for those who prefer to click on sixteenth-century Italian polyphony, two evenings are scheduled with the early-music ensemble Pomerium (July 20, 27). From Beowulf to Symphonic Jazz Adventure on the cutting edge is promised with the world premiere of Intimate Immensity, by the living legend Morton Subotnick, which features the vocalists Joan La Barbara and Thomas Buckner (icons of the avant-garde in their own right), not to mention a pair of Yamaha Disklaviers, which are controlled electronically by the movements of an angel, embodied on this occasion by the Balinese dancer I Nyoman Wenten, performing in the ancestral style (July 16, 18, 19).   A Mozart opera, solo Overriding conventional boundaries, Ornette Coleman's Skies of America integrates the jazz great's own octet Prime Time into the symphonic textures of the New York Philharmonic (July 8, 9). No festival is complete without its lunatic fringe. The Solo Magic Flute promises exactly what the title says. Starting with the overture, the tenor Christoph Homberger sings the entire score of Mozart's Masonic mystery by himself, unaccompanied. At least Homberger has an invisible partner: the director Herbert Wernicke, responsible lately for some of Europe's most stimulating opera productions (July 14, 16, 17, 18). Then there is Benjamin Bagby, whose seraphic medieval ensemble, Sequentia, climbed the charts with songs by the visionary Hildegard von Bingen. Accompanying himself on the harp, he chants--in the original Old English (which for all practical purposes might as well be Old Norse or contemporary Hungarian)--episodes from Beowulf. Prick up your ears for the part when the brawny hero goes mano a mano with the monster Grendel and rips Grendel's arm clear out of its socket (July 20, 21). Austin Baer is a writer based in New York. Go to ... Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.