WHO can tell whether Courtney Love has mellowed or is just tired of her old ill-tempered persona, but with the coming of the big bad millennium, the merry widow seems to be a gentler person – at least on stage.

At the Roseland Ballroom Tuesday for the first of two concerts, Love and her band, Hole, were sedate compared with past shows here in Skyscraper Park. There were no diatribes against anyone, no outrageously bad stage behavior. Instead, Love and company tried something radical – they let the music do most of the talking.

To that end, the quartet concentrated on material from their latest disc, “Celebrity Skin,” during the 100-minute show. The highlights included the title track (played as the whiz-bang encore finale); “Awful,” accompanied by a bang of confetti from the rafters, and “Northern Star,” rendered simply with acoustic six-string guitar accompaniment by Hole’s token boy, Eric Erlandson.

In past concerts, Love has never been able to re-create live the vocal feats she accomplished in the studio, which cast doubts on her lead-singing ability. As much as we love to hate Love, at Roseland she was pretty good at hitting the notes and infusing the tunes with a sense of passion (rather than anger). After a while, she even developed a rapport with the fans, albeit a strange one.

That relationship got off to a bad start. Instead of the usual quick look in purses for beers and bottles, there were full pat-down frisks of all fans – legs spread, arms up, metal detectors at the ready. According to security guys at Roseland, a worried Love had ordered the extra precautions. Many of the fans had to wait in the rain for quite some time just to enter the club. Hey, Courtney, that was no .38; the fans were just glad to see you.

Once inside, Miss Love made amends to the fans by selecting moshers – one at a time – to sit on the stage behind her and the band as the show progressed. Once on stage, Love routinely ordered her guests to “sit,” as if they were mosh-pit dogs. Not one kid on stage disobeyed the stern command of Courtney. If you think of Love as a control freak, you can say she invited the few on stage to keep the many moshing in the hope that they’d also be selected. But Courtney would never be that calculating, would she?

Still, it was a fairly fun show that rocked. Was it memorable, with great musical moments? No, but it was certainly Hole’s best NYC concert in five years.