September 29, 1984

Bruce Crawford, who was elected president of the Metropolitan Opera in May, will give up that title and become the company's general manager, according to high-ranking Met officials. The general manager is the principal administrative officer of the Met, America's largest and most important opera company. Mr. Crawford's appointment continues a tendency over the past decade for members of the board of directors to become Met administrators, and will end a prolonged period of uncertainty about the administrative future of the company. Mr. Crawford is currently president and chief executive officer of BBDO International, the world's seventh-largest advertising agency. Before becoming president of the Met in May, he had been a board member since 1976.

As the cold cuts were being prepared for an informal political supper, Representative Bob Edgar made a strong pitch to 50 people in a living room for help in his campaign and that of Representative Peter H. Kostmayer, a fellow Democrat. Their suburban Philadelphia districts, he said, must ''make the right choice on Nov. 6, as it relates to Bob Edgar and Peter Kostmayer, and as it regards national policy.'' Not a word about Walter F. Mondale or Geraldine A. Ferraro. An Intentional Distancing Asked about that omission, Mr. Edgar, a former Methodist pastor who must get up to 60,000 Republican votes to survive this year, said, ''There were Republicans in there, and you have to appeal to people where they are politically.'' Like Democrats in sharply contested districts around the country, Mr. Edgar and Mr. Kostmayer are putting distance between themselves and their Presidential ticket, cushioning themselves against a possible Reagan landslide.

The throngs of reporters and television crews at the White House today attested to the worldwide interest in President Reagan's meeting with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko. But two audiences were described as uppermost on Mr. Reagan's mind: the Russians and the Americans. Administration officials quickly characterized the meeting as successful in communicating the President's message of readiness to have a new relationship with Moscow. Yet they acknowledged that it would take time for it to become clear that reduced tensions are possible.

Basil A. Paterson said yesterday that he would not be a candidate for Mayor in 1985. Mr. Paterson, a former Deputy Mayor and New York Secretary of State, said he had called off his undeclared but much-discussed and already well-financed campaign because of ''pressing family problems.'' His decision left the group of politicians who are seeking a black to run against Mayor Koch without a candidate. Friends of the other elected citywide officials - Council President Carol Bellamy and Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin - promptly began assessing the altered political landscape.

The Pentagon's inspector general said today that Defense Department officials had used oversimplified and misleading test results in deciding to produce the Army's Sergeant York antiaircraft gun. In testimony before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Joseph H. Sherick, the inspector general, said an unusual program to accelerate the purchase of the gun had ''afforded minimal test information to the Government.'' He said the Army had given Defense Department officials charts purporting to show that the gun possessed ''a high level of effectiveness at long range'' and reacted rapidly to threats. These charts, he added, ''were oversimplified and, therefore, misleading and based on a selective analysis of the results'' of field trials.