FALL SERIES TAP INTO A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

As the seasons in Ambassador Auditorium and Royce Hall begin this week (with appearances by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and mezzo Frederica von Stade respectively), and with the opening on Wednesday of the Joffrey Ballet’s Music Center engagement, indoor cultural life in Los Angeles has been renewed.

So too has the competition for audiences. Major presenters, such as the three noted above, can attract attention with eye-catching advertisements and big-name attractions. But what about the little guys?

For Dorrance Stalvey, director of music programs at the L.A County Museum of Art, one solution is to target a specific audience through programming. For John Larry Granger, music director of the South Coast Symphony, tapping the growing pride of the local community is a key to success.

Stalvey points to Monday Evening Concerts, that venerable, intimate and traditionally eclectic series that opens its season at the museum’s Bing Theater on, natch, Monday night. The agenda will offer contemporary fare exclusively--and that holds true for the bulk of the season.

“My perception of these concerts now,” Stalvey notes, “is that audiences are becoming more specialized.” He noted that in the past, each concert mixed something old (perhaps a pinch of Pergolesi) with something new (say a sprinkle of Stockhausen). But look at the programs:

This week, “An American Sampler,” saluting the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts. The music: works by Reich, Cage, Wuorinen, Nancarrow, Budd and Copland. “I call the concert ‘An American Sampler,’ because I wanted to include as many different American styles of this century as possible,” Stalvey explains.

On Dec. 2, a German group called Ensemble 13 will play works of contemporary European composers Arvo Part, Detlev Mueller-Siemens and Manfred Reichert; on Jan. 20, a group of local free-form players will present an evening of “improvisations and sounds of the New Age.” And on it goes.

“I don’t want to do the older stuff just for the sake of format or tradition,” Stalvey comments, adding that other series at the museum can take up the slack--including the Never on Monday series (Wednesdays and Thursdays), that will offer, for example, a recorder recital by Frans Brueggen (Feb. 27), or the Bing Series, filled with traditional 18th- and 19th-Century chamber music.

“If you lump all the series together,” Stalvey sums up, “you’ll see that we actually cover several centuries. We just don’t mix them.”

Though only in its second season in Costa Mesa, the South Coast Symphony has made great strides in finding and attracting its audience. So says music director Granger--and he has the statistics to prove it.

“Our season tickets sales (numbering more than 500) have tripled from the first year,” he notes with pride. “And our budget is now $250,000. When we started as an educational orchestra 10 years ago, we had $7,000 to work with. And our 1985-86 grant from the city has doubled.”

The way Granger views it, “The arts help define a sense of community. And this community is experiencing a renaissance. People here want to find a group they can call their own.”

Granger’s ensemble begins its second season (titled, perhaps over optimistically, “The Tradition Continues”) on Saturday at Orange Coast College with music by Tchaikovsky. Granger admits that such conservative programming helps. But so does word-of-mouth advertising among the community. “We had 450 at our opening concert last year,” he notes, “but more than 1,000 at our final event.

“In the end, the audience tells how you’re doing.”

JOFFREY OPENING: Three premieres are included in the first week of the Joffrey Ballet’s engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Paul Taylor’s “Arden Court” (Wednesday and Saturday nights) and Pilobolus’ “Untitled” (Thursday night and Saturday afternoon) are two of three works presented here by the company for the first time. John Cranko’s “Jeu de Cartes” (Friday) constitutes the sole Los Angeles premiere during the first week. The other local premiere, Gerald Arpino’s “Reflections,” will be unveiled in the second and final week.

OTHER OPENINGS: As mentioned, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, led by Bernard Haitink, will inaugurate the new season at Ambassador Auditorium this week. On Wednesday, the program lists two symphonies: Haydn’s No. 88 and Mahler’s No. 5. The following night, a pair of symphonies (Bizet’s C-major and Beethoven’s Seventh) surround Debussy’s “Jeux.”

Cellist Carter Brey will be the soloist on Friday as the Peninsula Chamber Orchestra opens its season at the Norris Theatre. Douglas Lowry will conduct.