COSTA MESA CENTER HITS A HIGH NOTE

Eight costumed trumpeters sent John Williams’ fast-tongued “Olympic Fanfare” reverberating across the arriving crowds and a spokework of searchlights wigwagged into the night sky beside a huge spread of party tents.

The inaugural of the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Monday night was, indubitably, a Gee Whiz event on a scale you don’t encounter often in a lifetime. It was an assertion of civic pride, prosperity and high intentions, but there was somehow more cheerfulness than solemnity in the air.

There was also, as you heard around the tables in the themed and artful dining areas after the concert, a sense of participation, not just of attendance. Over the half-dozen years that led to this week’s opening (or series of openings), the center had organized a very large network of support groups and guilds stretching across the county. The donors and the volunteers were large among the hundreds Monday night, pleased--as they had a right to be--at what they had wrought.

The Performing Arts Center is a triumph of volunteerism and the private sector. In this it clearly reflects what you think of as the spirit of the county, an assertive individualism that sets high value on traditional free enterprise. “Do It Yourself” is still on the Orange County coat of arms.

The county was probably never quite so simple to psyche out as its detractors said it was, and it is certainly a more various place now than it has ever been--a high-tech and high-commerce present blending with the residual power (and the fast-disappearing evidences) of an agrarian past. A political conservatism, no longer ironclad, runs with an active liberal confidence in the economic future.

Past and present have joined hands in an expensive and confident investment in the future of the performing arts. The nearly $71 million raised or pledged is an amazing sum by any standards and it has bought a razzle-dazzle structure which is elegant but leagues away from the hidebound or traditional.

It is an ironic tribute to the acoustics of the hall that a good chesty cough has the barking clarity of a rifle shot, and in flu season you may be grateful for the loud passages in the music. But to an amateur ear, any start-up difficulties seemed to involve the miking of the voices, problems easily solved.

William Kraft’s specially commissioned opener, with its chimes, bells and murmurations, seemed like a witty Cadenza for Acoustics, and it did prove that the auditorium can accommodate a whispery shimmer down to the last whisp.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center is off and running, but, as with any race, it remains a suspenseful story. For one thing, the income from its generous endowment will not begin to flow in full measure for five to 10 years. Meanwhile the center will remain hat in hand for supplemental operating income. The support groups have not outlived their crucial usefulness yet.

The center may prove to have a wider historical interest, as being the last to have been privately funded under the generosities built into the old tax structure. The full implications of tax reform on discretionary giving and spending are far from clear, and it could be that Orange County will be seen to have got in under the wire as a wholly private gesture.

The further suspense is whether it will continue to attract audiences once the excitements of the launching have faded with the echoes of the fanfares. But listening to the busy signals on the center’s reservation phones, and watching the rapt attention to Beethoven’s Ninth on Monday night, I’m prepared to think that clientele will not be a major worry when the offerings, like the building itself, are world class.

Strolling the encircling ramp to the high-rising window wall of the mezzanine entrance the other evening, I couldn’t help thinking of the first tour I’d made of the area a quarter-century ago, when there were still only the wide fields of lima beans but where--then in the mind’s eye and on the drafting boards of the planners--there would one day be cities and towers and temples. There are the cities and the towers and now, by the efforts of a few thousand good men and women, there is a temple, secular and spectacular, to the performing arts as an irresistible adjunct of the good life.