REVIVING AN ORCHESTRA FOR POPS

John Barcellona thinks big. The new general manager of the Master Symphony, the 7-year-old professional orchestra based in the southeast part of Los Angeles County, says he wants “to make the Master Symphony on the West Coast what the Boston Pops is on the East Coast.”

Barcellona doesn’t plan to accomplish that goal all at once, or even all by himself. From offices in Norwalk City Hall provided by the city of Norwalk, and with a one-time $74,000 grant given to the orchestra by the same municipality, the flutist/flute salesman/teacher (he is a member of the faculties at both Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Fullerton) is at work planning a 1985-86 season for the Master Symphony to be based--where else?--in Norwalk.

He has already announced the appointment of conductor/pianist Peter Nero as music director of the revived 80-member ensemble that was founded in 1978 by conductor Philip Westin. But the key to the orchestra’s future, Barcellona says, is a concert on June 15 at the 2,000-seat Excelsior High School Auditorium.

If successful, Barcellona says the orchestra, conducted by Nero, will do concerts in November and in January and June of 1986, will probably begin a subscription drive in the fall and will likely go ahead on plans for a number of concerts on the road.

“What we really need to find out is, will the audience we think is out there--the audience which always turned up before when Peter appeared with us (at La Mirada Civic Theatre, Downey Civic Theatre, Marsee Auditorium at El Camino College and Ambassador Auditorium)--follow us to a new hall?” Barcellona says.

“We think the answer is positive. We think, with the recent demise of the Long Beach Symphony, leaving the Master Symphony as the only fully professional orchestra in the county, south of the Music Center, that there is a market for this. We’re going to find out.”

Wait a minute.

Isn’t the Master Symphony the same orchestra that used to play Mahler and Verdi, not to mention Prokofiev and Piston, in classy auditoria from Pasadena to Santa Barbara to El Camino to Claremont? The one that began life as an idealized, living adjunct to a noble educational project called Music Odyssey? The one that engaged high-powered soloists and brought them to a largely unsophisticated public in Cerritos, La Mirada and Downey?

Yes and no. Yes, the orchestra contains basically the same players but, despite using the same old name, the repertory is new. In effect, the “classical” Master Symphony died last year and a “pops” Master Symphony has risen from its ashes. The “reorganized” Master Symphony will now be, according to Barcellona, one of four North American pops orchestras performing concert series conducted by Nero--and the best in the West.

What happened?

In the 1982-83 season, when its budget reached a high of $980,000, the Master Symphony, under Westin, performed more than 100 services--rehearsals and performances--of nine different programs.

And it did so with decent success at the box office. “Where most professional orchestras expect to make 30% of their budget at the box office, our funding formula, created by Cerritos College, our sponsor until 1983, called for 40% of the budget to be made at the box office. For the most part, we succeeded,” Westin says, today.

Still, there were financial difficulties along the way. Fearing shortages, the board, during that 1982-83 season, asked Westin to cut back on the budget. As a result, two presentations were reprogrammed (a concert version of Verdi’s “Aida” became a concert of Verdi works and, in another instance, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was dropped in favor of works requiring a smaller orchestra) and one concert (of Mahler’s Fifth) was canceled altogether.

Then, in the financial fallout from the passage of Proposition 13, the orchestra’s sponsor, Cerritos College, canceled the umbrella program (Music Odyssey) under which the ensemble was funded. Even then, Westin and the Master Symphony limped along for another season. But the day after their final concert together in March, 1984, Westin resigned, saying he could see that the orchestra’s future was secure only if it turned to pops music, which did not appeal to him.

“After Phil resigned,” Barcellona recalls, “I called a meeting of the orchestra’s principal players. Then I called a general meeting of the players. We all agreed we wanted to keep the orchestra going.”

It wasn’t just the work, Barcellona says.

“Because of the way the orchestra was founded--with all that funding, Phil was able to audition and hire the best free-lance players in Southern California, the cream of the studio musicians--we started life as a first-rate orchestra.

“From the beginning, we had the confidence and the quality it takes other orchestras years to develop. Naturally, we wanted to stay together.”

The 1984-85 season, Barcellona admits, has been a lean one for the ensemble.

“We played Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ with the Southern California Mormon Choir, Dec. 7, in the Pavilion of the Music Center. Then the next morning, here in Norwalk (at the Excelsior High School Auditorium), we did two one-hour performances of the work with the choir, but without soloists. In the evening, we gave another full performance.”

Since then, the Master Symphony has given a young people’s concert on Feb. 19 that drew a capacity audience of students from Norwalk and La Mirada. Another similar performance is scheduled for May 1.

“With an orchestra as good as ours--and Phil Westin built a magnificent ensemble--we want it all to happen now,” says Ada Steenhoek, a member of the Master Symphony board since the Westin days and now its chairman. “We hope, realistically, to go to 18 concerts in our second season (1986-87).’

But, Steenhoek acknowledges, the orchestra faces two serious problems-- a new concert location and a major fund-raising drive. “Our p.r. work is very important at this time,” she says.

As for fund raising, Steenhoek says the orchestra members are also participating. “We are approaching possible corporate sponsors with teams made up of one board member and one orchestra member. The response has been very positive so far.”

Impatience is her only problem, Steenhoek says.

Barcellona says a drive has been launched to sell tickets to the June 15 concert. “We want to find out if the audience we think is out there is really out there,” he says. If it is, then Barcelllona says the orchestra can expand beyond pops music. “Eventually, we would like to encompass the whole musical spectrum. We can be an opera orchestra and a ballet orchestra, too. But we have to go slow.”

“This comes at a particularly good time,” Nero says from his Los Angeles home. He is music director and principal conductor of the Philly Pops Orchestra in Philadelphia, which he says gives 24 concerts (eight different programs) every season. Nero also leads pops series with the major symphonic organizations of Tulsa, Okla., and Edmonton, Alberta.

“In the coming season, I will be cutting down the touring with my trio quite a bit, in order to devote time to the three pops orchestras I’m responsible for.”

A classically trained musician, and one who “used to conduct all my recording sessions,” the 50-year-old jazz pianist never conducted in public until “one night, in the late ‘60s, appearing with the Pittsburgh Symphony, (the late) Lehman Engel offered me the baton. From that one experience, I got the bug.”

Nero’s approach to pops programming is not traditional.

“I don’t believe in the segmented kind of programming some other conductors do, where there is no mixing of styles in different parts of the program.

“With the Philly Pops--which has no connection to the Philadelphia Orchestra at all--I’ve been able to experiment, and to work out my ideas of programming from scratch.”

Those ideas now include “a mix of heavy classical with light classical with pops with straight swing or even with rock ‘n’ roll.

“My idea is to mix things up within the parts of a program. On one program I placed side by side on the second half a 14-minute arrangement of music from ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and the Finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

“It is my theory that there is, out there, a tremendous audience not made up of purists. To that audience, music is music and they like it all.”