ENCORE! CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF THE MUSIC CENTER : TOMORROW : THE NEXT 25 YEARS: A GOLDEN FUTURE

“They are all dreams and somebody could say they’re silly dreams, but you know you don’t get anyplace if you don’t dream.”- Esther Wachtell, president, Music Center

True, it doesn’t cost anything to dream, and when the major dreamers at the 25-year-old Music Center are asked to project their vision 25 years into the future, to the year 2014, imaginations run wild.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director/producer of the Center Theatre Group, jests: “They wheel me out onto the stage, I’ll be pushing into middle-80s, and (say), ‘As a special reward for your long service, we’re asking you, first of all, to retire . . .’ ”

Outside of that whimsical scenario, Davidson envisions a major repertory company of 100 players, with maybe 40 on leave at any one time, another 20 on tour and the other 40 performing classics on a rotating schedule, including such modern classics as Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Another of his fantasies: “I would love it if the Music Center were the crucible for new musical theater. It’s so important, so indigenous to who we are, so all pervasive in terms of music, the ability to hear it, so powerful and capable of cutting across all lines.”

Some look several years ahead if not exactly 25.

Gerald Arpino, artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet, wants a future company of “60-something dancers” doing two seasons of six weeks each. The company will be larger “because it has to be,” and it must have time to develop young artists. “That is the threat to America,” he says, “not having the luxury to develop the young artist, to be giving the time, not always to produce, produce ...”

Peter Hemmings, general director of the Music Center Opera, wants a 70-performance season within the next five years, about the same level as the Chicago Lyric Opera. He is most enthusiastic about that day when the Philharmonic leaves the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and moves into Disney Hall in 1994 . Hemmings alludes to that day when “once the Pavilion is ours.”

Ernest Fleischmann, executive vice president and managing director of the Philharmonic, is convinced that the orchestra will “grow in quality because it will have its own home in Disney Hall to rehearse and perform as it needs.” He hopes that the hall “will become the world focus of orchestral music . . . Every great orchestra has to play in London, in New York, has to play maybe in Vienna, to a certain extent, for its own prestige and so on. I hope to be able to add Los Angeles to these stations.”

Esther Wachtell says the Music Center is creating “an absolutely world-class product.” She aims for the concept of expanding Los Angeles as a media center. “We would take the product that is created on these stages,” she says, “film it--some in live performances, others in a studio--and then you put that into videos, put that on TV, on cable and you begin to bring it to more people.

“We’re starting now and in 25 years we will be a media center. The first thing I have to find are sponsors and/or a producing company . . .”

Of course, all these ambitions need fueling. On the matter of money, Charles I. Schneider, chairman of the Music Center Operating Company, figures that the Music Center Foundation will continue growing. “We have about $50 million in its endowment,” he says, “and in about 25 years probably it will be about $200 million.

Some people see new alliances in the future. Says Gerald Arpino: “The Los Angeles/New York relationship is one that’s going to set a whole new perspective on how the arts can survive in this country, and definitely is going to lead to new avenues of thinking of how the arts will be able to support the large cities . . . All eyes are going to be looking here.”

“I’ll surprise you with one comment,” Charles Schneider says. “I think that you are going to see a much closer relationship between the Orange County Performing Arts Center and ourselves in years to come. I believe Orange County is going to grow. It’s going to develop an identity of its own, and performers and shows that come out here are going to be given two venues, which is more economical.

“In the last two years we’ve been working with Kennedy Center, Denver Center for the Performing Arts and Lincoln Center to put together a circuit of venues and to jointly produce shows.”

Then there is the alliance of the art forms. Gordon Davidson says that “my other great fantasy” is regular creative combinations of the resources of the Philharmonic, the opera and the theater.

“I did an opera, ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I’m doing ‘Oedipus,’ ” he says, “but I’d love to see that happen on a regular basis.”

Likewise, Fleischmann says, “I also hope we can work much more closely with the Opera and Center Theatre Group and even with museums. I would love to involve visual arts supporters who are ignorant of what we do. You go to any museum function and there’s hardly any crossover, it’s amazing.”

Adds Arpino: “I see a major development of new playwrights and collaborations between all the theater forms.”

At the core of many visions is a sense of the need for a powerful mix of cultures that reflect Southern California.

Esther Wachtell notes that such a commitment may sound grand but “the truth of the matter is that anybody who is at all sensitive to creativity knows that the thing that is great about us is that we are diverse. That is where our greatness is--both the Music Center and the city.”

She thinks that the Music Center has brought all the elements of the region together in the past 25 years: “I don’t think that Lincoln Center, as great as it is, for whatever reason, in the development of New York, shares the kind of pivotal importance in people’s lives that the Music Center does here. And it’s only because of an accident of history. It became a part of the Renaissance of the city in the late 20th Century. It grasped and then has held the imagination of the people of the city, and therefore has been able to stand as a symbol.”

But how to achieve cultural mix? Wachtell points to some current attempts: “Jim Rosser (president of California State University, Los Angeles), who has been working on the symphony board, is heading up a committee to address multicultural needs through music. He is bringing the Joffrey to Cal State L.A. and to a population that is the new Los Angeles. He is planning to work with Gordon Davidson and bringing work from the Taper there.

“I have to look at Yolanda Nava on the Center Theatre Group board and Hiromoto Seki, the Japanese consul general, who is on our (Music Center) board.”

But fewer people from the multicultural communities are going into arts management. “They are coming out of an economic ghetto situation and they want to grasp the brass ring, and you don’t do it as an arts manager,” Wachtell says. “What we are doing is beginning to work with those arts managers who are coming out of Cal State Dominguez Hills and places like that who are multicultural and bring them in here in an internship capacity so that they can begin to work their way into the arts management field . . . These programs are going to bear fruit.”

Davidson figures that the toughest part of future-looking is trying to predict the nature of the society: “Yes, we will be a majority of Hispanics. That could profoundly alter everything we want to talk about in terms of what this institution can and should do. My dream is that this place be alive to the community, and truly doesn’t act as a responder to the community but also helps lead.”

Davidson dreams of the rep company performing the great works of Western culture “but the challenge here is that we are on the Pacific Rim. I don’t think it would be possible 25 years from now to only talk in terms of Western culture. I hope we could talk as comfortably and be more knowledgeable about Eastern culture. (And) that there is a blending.

“Latino culture has its roots in Mayan and Aztec cultures but it also inherits Western forms with a Latin beat . . . The great works of Chinese, Japanese or Indian literature are relatively unknown to us. I think in the world of the future, they will be less known.”

Fleischmann sees the need for the Philharmonic “to be closely involved in the whole cultural change taking place in the development of various ethnic communities coming together here.”

He takes particular note that “classical music seems to be the one common factor among Asians, Westerners and, to a certain extent, Latinos. The classical music audiences in Japan, Korea and Mexico are enormous. There are more symphony orchestras per capita in Mexico than the United States. Many of them are government supported . . .”

Hemmings says that “what is exercising everybody here at the moment is whether or not it is going to be possible to attract Asian and Latin American immigrants to the Music Center. Because in our case, opera is basically a more European art form. But on the other hand opera is popular in Japan, particularly Western-style opera, and there was beginning to be an interest in China.”

Hemmings is “very keen to do operas in Spanish and to create operas in Spanish on South American subjects,” and he wonders if those operas would attract the Hispanic community.

Expanding companies, expanding seasons. Few artistic managers prefer to think smaller.

The opera company, for example, sees the expanding horizons.

“I think we’ve got to take it in several leaps,” says Hemmings. “I think that in the next four or five years, when we shall be sharing the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the symphony, it will mean that our expansion is very gradual--moving from eight to nine operas, possibly to 10 by the end of the period.

“So the time will come when we go from four performances of each opera to five, and extra ones with very popular pieces. Then, of course, we have to be looking all the time to what will happen in the Pavilion once the symphony moves across to Walt Disney Hall.

“And when that happens we can put on perhaps a fall season and a spring season. I expect we will be at the same number of performances as Chicago Lyric Opera within the next five years or so--about 70. We’re at 48 already and we’re just finishing our third season.”

Hemmings doesn’t endorse “a year-round, seven-performance-a-week operation.” That doesn’t work these days. “It becomes too much of a machine. Very few places still do that, some of the very big German houses . . . but they’ve got a ballet company as well. The only place in the United States is the Met.”

But “once the Pavilion is ours,” he says, “then we would be in a position to do a substantial number of those weeks (that the Philharmonic had), if we’ve got the audience and the money.”

“It’s going to be a very different world,” says Gordon Davidson. “And I’m not a futurist or crystal-ball-gazer (but) the optimist in me wants to believe that there will indeed be a Music Center, that it won’t have succumbed to any kind of petrified state and not become a fossil in any way.

“I can’t make predictions about the future of symphonic music and grand opera. (But) I think the theater always has a chance to be vital because it does speak immediately to its time and place, or ought to. And certainly the world that we’ve carved out for ourselves reflects that in the Taper.”

Because of film, Davidson notes, Los Angeles “has the greatest talent pool possible. The very thing that makes it possible also makes it difficult. Film and television make the talent pool available but it also makes them unavailable because of the financial discrepancy.

“Obviously since we’re talking about fantasy, not reality, the fantasy is that we can create a system of significant funding for an ongoing repertory.”

He calls it “the living library (of theater), to have the equivalents of Beethoven and Rembrandt and Gauguin.” That is, the great plays of Western literature playing in a repertoire.

Gerald Arpino sees further evolvement of the art form: “Dance will change, in rhythm, in style, and it will reflect how we change. That’s all choreography can do. It can only reflect where we are in our time . . . There will be a change of focus of how the body is used as an instrument of architecture.

“But we’ll never lose the myth of man. That will be eternal. There will always be that odyssey in which he travels. He will look to the wonder of new places (for inspiration): The Asian influence--the attitudes, the quietness, the beauty--and the richness of Mexican folklore. I already have an idea . . .”