OPERA HITS PAY DIRT ON COMMERCIAL

In these days of tight budgeting, American opera directors can only dream of the luxury of television advertising. It was no surprise, then, that San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell jumped at the opportunity to have his company appear in someone else’s commercial.

For the last two weeks, the local opera company has been featured in a Pacific Bell commercial touting the advantages of its Telemarketing, a consulting and marketing service that helped boost the opera’s subscription base 15% over the last two years.

The commercial is being aired primarily by San Francisco and Los Angeles television stations, and Campbell is understandably pleased to receive statewide television exposure.

“Not a few people, especially in San Francisco, were shocked to see San Diego on the television screen,” said Campbell, who has received a number of calls from Northern California since the commercial was released.

According to Florence Babbitt of San Francisco’s Foote, Cone and Belding advertising agency, the opera company was chosen “because it was one of Telemarketing’s success stories and because San Diego Opera is highly esteemed in the arts community.”

At first Babbitt and her client, Pacific Bell, were looking at symphony orchestras and small theaters for one of the series of Telemarketing commercials, but the visual possibilities of an opera company changed their minds.

After watching video-cassette versions of operas in San Diego’s repertory, Babbitt and project music director Jimmy Haskell chose the famous entry scene from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” for the commercial. In mid-November, San Diego Opera took its “Butterfly” set out of mothballs and set it up in the Civic Theatre. Although the opera appears for less than a minute in the commercial, it required three days of filming. Civic Theatre’s downstairs rehearsal hall was turned into a cafeteria so that everyone would be available at all times on the set.

For the San Diego Opera orchestra, however, the assignment turned out to be a variation of lip-synch, because the sound recording was done the previous week in a Los Angeles sound studio whose services had already been contracted by Harmony Pictures, the firm that filmed the commercial. “Our orchestra was shot while playing along to tape of sound studio recording,” explained San Diego Opera associate conductor Karen Keltner.

According to Keltner, the arrival of the opera principals and chorus members in the sound recording studios was a meeting of two worlds. “We were amazed at their high-tech mixing procedures, and everyone at the sound studio was amazed that we did everything live, since all of their work is done with voice-overs.”

Haskell, an experienced and esteemed arranger of popular music, was supposed to conduct the instrumentalists and opera chorus. But after being faced with the rhythmic nuances of a Puccini score, he soon turned the baton over to Keltner.

Back in San Diego, Keltner received star treatment when a solo conductor’s shot of her was taken. “They built a mock podium on the stage and had me conduct an imaginary orchestra,” explained Keltner. “I had to do it wearing three different outfits, with the omnipresent makeup person standing by daubing on makeup. Just to tease me, I think, they hooked up a smoke machine for an ethereal effect, amusingly called a ‘Hollywood shot.’ ”

One of the unique challenges of making the commercial was coordinating the demands of the five unions involved: the television workers, the chorus, the instrumentalists, the stage hands and the wardrobe people. Just making their required breaks align, according to Keltner, required extensive calculation.