PERFORMING ARTS : Extra--Baritone Seduced by L.A.! : Would you rather live near Zurich or Upland? To native Angeleno Rodney Gilfry, who has returned home from a seven-year stint in Europe, it’s an easy call.

Rodney Gilfry relaxes in a chair on Los Angeles Music Center plaza. A showy succulent--an opening night gift for “Faust”--and a small black briefcase, complete with cel phone, sit at his feet.

The baritone in surfer shades scans the facade of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where he’s sung many times. But these days his view has changed: After seven years abroad, it’s his hometown house once again.

Gilfry has been based in Europe, where his reputation as an opera singer--and particularly a performer of Mozart roles--has been growing. And while he has continued to perform at least one role with L.A. Music Center Opera almost every season during these years, it wasn’t until now that he could once again call his native Los Angeles home.

Gilfry--whose previous Mozart roles with L.A. Opera include Figaro in “The Marriage of Figaro” and Papageno in “The Magic Flute”--takes over the title role in “Don Giovanni” from Thomas Allen for the performances of Oct. 11 and 14.

The role of the remorselessly womanizing charmer holds great promise for the handsome and charismatic Gilfry, although he has only two previous productions, in Lyon and Parma, under his belt.

“With Don Giovanni, I’m in my infancy,” he says. “That’s a character that you never find the bottom of.”

Gilfry has learned the lesson of pushing his talents too quickly into roles that don’t suit him as well as the Don. “I have done some dangerous experimentation with some roles that I shouldn’t have done that were too dramatic, too heavy, like Orest in ‘Elektra,’ ” he says.

“I’m much more careful now about what I take so that I don’t overextend myself. I’m happy to say that nothing in my future is dangerous. They’re primarily lyric roles.”

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Reared in West Covina and Claremont, Gilfry, 35, originally planned on a career as a music educator.

“I didn’t start by going to opera and falling in love with the genre and deciding this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “I started by studying music in high school and college and then I started doing more and more solo singing.”

A scholarship to study music at USC encouraged him. “Between the time that I finished my bachelor’s degree (at Cal State Fullerton) and the time I started my master’s (at USC), I decided that I would give solo performing a shot. I found it fun and I was successful at it, so I just continued.”

Going to Europe was a post-grad career move. “There’s a great advantage to working in Europe as an opera singer or a classical musician and that’s that there’s so much work,” Gilfry says. “From Zurich, the longest that you have to fly to get to a major opera house is an hour and a half. It’s like having 65 opera houses in the Western United States.”

But that initial gambit was never meant to last so long for the Gilfry family. “We only intended to stay in Europe for two years and it ended up being seven,” Gilfry says. “I hadn’t finished what I’d set out to do. I wanted to sing in the important centers there like La Scala, Vienna and Hamburg and Covent Garden and Paris.”

Family considerations, however, began to argue for a move back. “At the end of seven years there, our kids--who are 9, 7 and 5 years old now--were at the ages where if we stayed any longer they would become so entrenched in the school system and with their friends that it would be harder to take them back to America,” Gilfry says. “We like the American way of life and wanted our kids to grow up as American kids.”

And the L.A. area seemed like the logical place for them to do that. “The greatest thing about being here is to be back with family again,” says Gilfry, who last month moved into a home across from that of his wife’s sister in an area east of Upland. “No matter how long we were going to be living in Switzerland, it wasn’t our country.”

The return, of course, has required a little adjusting. “It’s strange to be back,” Gilfry says. “I slipped back into the old lifestyle a little too comfortably. There have been some unpleasant affirmations of my suspicions, like the smog problem. So what did I do? I went out and bought two cars, so it’s not like I’m helping.”

Yet, overall, it was a good move--one that Gilfry felt his career could handle. “I don’t think it’ll set me back,” he says. “I’ve got a pretty good foothold in Europe and here as well. Five years ago, I couldn’t have done that. I would have left Europe and been forgotten. But now I have enough engagements in the future in Europe that I’m not worried about it.”

His L.A. Opera roles this season--including Valentin in “Faust,” which has its final performance on Wednesday, and Dr. Malatesta in “Don Pasquale” (March 18-April 1, 1995)--will allow Gilfry to spend more time at home in L.A. than he had in Zurich.

And “Don Giovanni” allows Gilfry a third pass at a character he’s portrayed in two very different stagings already. “The first was traditional,” says Gilfry of a 1991 production in Lyon. “The one that I just finished (a production that began in Parma, toured and culminated in a recording for Deutsche Grammophon) was like Don Giovanni as a bad boy rock star. It was incisive, even bitter and edgy at times, and that’s how I sang it as well.”

The L.A. Opera production, which is a revival of Jonathan Miller’s 1991 staging, offers yet another approach. “What we’re doing has humor,” Gilfry says. “This is a multifaceted character and there are more playful moments.”

Although Gilfry hopes to do one or two productions in L.A. each season, he will be on the road a bit more next year, although he’ll be able to spend a substantial amount of time in the United States--he’ll sing Olivieri in “Capriccio” for the Chicago Lyric Opera’s 1994-95 season, and Valentin in a San Francisco Opera production of “Faust” in 1995-96.

He doesn’t plan to venture far from the lyric roles that are his specialty, though. “I’d rather discover (that I’m ready for certain roles) and then schedule them for five years in the future than schedule something for five years in the future that I’m not sure I’m (going to be) ready to sing and have it come looming before me (when) my voice hasn’t developed the way that I thought it might,” says Gilfry. “I’ve done that in the past. I kind of let people diversify my repertoire, which is not a wise way to go.”

If and when he is ready to branch out, it may be easier to do that here in the U.S. “There’s less resistance to diversifying repertoire here, but I think it’s mostly based on ignorance,” says Gilfry. “I don’t mean that in a negative way necessarily. It can be good, because if you want to do something traditionally considered out of your repertoire, it might be easier to try it out here.”

On the other hand, there’s really no place to hide. “If you do it in a big house here, everybody knows about it,” says Gilfry. “You’ve got five major houses (in the U.S.) and they all get reviewed so everybody knows. You could try something experimental in a small house in Germany and not many people are going to know about it.”

G ilfry does venture happily into the realm of musical theater. He was seen here, for instance, as Curly in the Music Center Opera’s 1990 production of “Oklahoma!”

Yet the baritone would like to see more such fare at the Music Center. “We need to do musical theater at the L.A. Opera,” says Gilfry. “They should do one American musical a year. It’s our own native operetta, so to speak, and it needs to be promoted.”

He does not, however, think such productions should be used simply as bait. “I don’t think it should be done just as candy for potential opera goers,” Gilfry says. “As an opera company, we can do it with the singing one notch up, with a different perspective.”

And he suggests that the Music Center Opera company, in particular, now in its ninth season, might be ready to present more diverse fare. “It’s been unfortunate that L.A. has had to postpone some productions, but they basically have been operating in the black,” says Gilfry of his hometown company. “That they are doing as well as they are in the face of the economic problems in California is a sign of their stability.”

Still, the mandate for any opera company these days can be daunting.

“L.A. Opera and other organizations like that are trying to teach the public what they need to make up for a lack of cultural depth and that’s really difficult,” says Gilfry. “The audience is out there. It’s just a matter of finding the people and educating them.”

Vital Stats

“Don Giovanni”

Address: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown

Price: $21-$115

Hours: Opens Tuesday, 7:30 p.m., then repeats Friday and Oct. 2, 5, 11 and 14 at 7:30 p.m. (Gilfry, Oct. 11 and 14 only) and Oct. 8 at 1 p.m.

Phone: (213) 972-7211