Vladimir Pankov_swept in rather like an arson in the night, set fire to the newlheater season at dawn and then disappeared. That is figuratively speaking of course.

The fire Pankov set was his new dramatization of a tale from Nikolai Gogol's story cycle "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka." Working as always now out of his SounDrama Studio, he focused strictly on the story "A May Night, or the Drowned Woman" and he called the show "Gogol. Evenings. Part I." The premiere took place in the packed hall of the Meyerhold Center where future performances will also be held.

For now, however, Pankov and his show are already long gone. He is hard at work on his next production, a rendition of Marina Tsvetayeva's poem "The Swain," which will have its world premiere in France before opening in Moscow in November. At about that same time "Gogol. Evenings. Part I" will resume performances at the Meyerhold Center.

Pankov has created a stir in recent seasons with his SounDrama Studio, mounting a series of shows that mix music and drama in a fuller, more integral way than is common in dramatic theater. These include such shows as "Morphine" at the Et Cetera Theater and "Passage" at the Playwright and Director Center. As a composer and/or musical director he has taken part in such productions as "The Petty Bourgeoisie" at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater and "Scorched" at Et Cetera.

In a sense, "Gogol. Evenings" takes the director back to his beginnings. His first so-called soundrama production, "Red Thread," was mounted three long years ago at the Playwright and Director Center. Although based on a prose work written by the St. Petersburg author Alexander Zheleztsov in the 1980s, "Red Thread" was shot through with elements of folk culture. It told the fragmented story of a group of ethnographers and musicians traveling the back roads of

Russia in search of forgotten folk songs. "Gogol. Evenings" is the most unapologetic piece of folk theater Pankov has delivered since then.

Story-telling is at the heart of Gogol's prose and Pankov, with librettist Irina Lychagina, literally puts it at stage center at the outset of his new show. An actor playing the narrator (Sergei Rodyukov) sits with his back to the audience, hunched over in a rumpled, moth-eaten overcoat, mumbling the words of a story in a sing-song voice that sounds a little like an Orthodox priest reciting the liturgy. The stage then fills with approximately a dozen performers dressed in Ukrainian folk costumes. The sadly gloomy narrator describes the extraordinary beauty of the Ukrainian nights as the other performers sing a rousing Ukrainian folk song. The joy and power of the music cuts across the narrator's lonely, melancholy timbre, nearly drowning it out. From that moment on the performance becomes a tug-o-war between the forces of joy and sorrow, elation and fear. In short, Pankov drives right into the heart of the Gogolian experience.

What emerges is the tale of the people in a small village whose most powerful and important figure is called Golova, or the head (Andrei Zavodyuk). Feared and respected by all, he is greeted by the young women of the town with a deferential "good day" each time they pass him. This tends to irk the young local men who see a threat in Golova's power over the women, although there is little they can do about it.

The story shifts gears when it begins focusing on a specific pair of lovers, Hanna (Alisa Estrina) and Golova's son Levko (Pavel Akimkin). They come together on one of those magical Ukrainian summer nights when the boys and girls of the village are pairing off quietly in dark places under the stars as young lovers do. Naturally, Levko and Hanna have more trouble finding their way into each other's arms, although that only makes their eventual coming together all the sweeter.

Akimkin and Estrina, placed by Pankov right on the edge of the stage at arm's length from the spectators in the first row, are superb. Fresh, vulnerable and deeply sensitive, they beautifully convey the sense of innocence, desire and discovery that move their characters.

This is Gogol, however, so humor, mysticism and the supernatural are never far away even as Hanna and Levko begin sinking into the reveries of sated lovers. To Levko's endless irritation, Hanna desperately wants him to tell her a stoiy even as she falls asleep. Against his will and despite several attempts to cut the stoiy short, Levko does, however, tell Hanna an increasingly wild tale about water sprites and a young woman who drowned herself. As things develop, it increasingly seems that Levko himself is falling under the spell of the witches and, perhaps, Hanna is one of their number. To Levko's horror, he even happens upon a scene that nearly drives him mad - his father attacking Hanna viciously as he swears to her that Levko has never loved her.

By this time the quiet, romantic idyll of the Ukrainian nights has been rent asunder literally and figuratively. The sweet bed of love

made by Hamia and Levko has been replaced by a hostile world of people threatening harm at every step. And Pankov's large cast of actor-musicians has transformed the soundscape of the performance from the lilting strains of folk melodies into the harsh, grating grunts, crashes and screams of a universe coming apart at the seams.

The instruments are the same basic ones Pankov has used since "Red Thread" - a stand-up bass, a cello, a violin, a handful of wind instruments and a rack of percussive devices such as chimes, cow bells, drums and ratchets. The musicians are the inhabitants of this seemingly accursed village, just as the actors playing the townspeople are musicians. Akimkin reveals he is a talented tenor when he unexpectedly bursts into song. In Pankov's hands the unsettling atmosphere of Gogol's tale is translated into sound and fury performed by actors and musicians alike. The story itself, or at least the actual words of the tale, for a time becomes secondary to Pankov's musical interpretation of it.

Pankov and librettist Lychagina deflate the pathos of the swirling supernatural passions with the same ease and lightheartedness that Gogol employed himself. Levko, having survived a terrifying dousing at the hands of a bevy of witches, seems to come out of dream. "Was I really sleeping?" he asks himself incredulously. But if he was, where did he get that note that carries an order for Golova to give his son permission to marry Hanna? There appears to be more going on beneath the starry Ukrainian sky than meets the eye.

Pankov's "Gogol. Evenings. Part I" may be this director-composer's most fully realized production to date. It does an excellent job of translating Gogol's richly bizarre universe to the stage. And it certainly got this young season off to a sizzling start.