MUSIC : ‘Requiem’ to Reunite Soprano Ruth Golden and Chorale’s William Hall

When New York Opera soprano Ruth Golden steps on the stage of Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa on Friday night, she will be collaborating with an old friend.

Golden will be one of two soloists in Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem” with the Master Chorale of Orange County, led by music director William Hall. (The other soloist will be baritone Rodney Gilfry.)

“I’ve been singing on and off with Bill Hall since 1981,” Golden said in a recent phone interview. “I think I’ve done nine or 10 works with Bill, and it’s been a wonderful association.”

Most recently, she sang in Poulenc’s “Gloria” with Hall when he led his first concert as a guest conductor of the Master Chorale in December, 1987, several months before he was appointed the group’s music director.

Golden grew up in Southern California and remembers being “always musical, doing shows as a child.

“I had the obligatory piano lessons at age of 6,” she said. “But it all started to take when I was at Beverly Hills High School. Then music became very serious. I did about 100 concerts a year in my junior and senior years.”

She went to UC Berkeley to study music as an undergraduate, and a trip across the bay changed her life.

“I saw (Luciano) Pavarotti and Teresa Stratas,” she recalls, “in (Puccini’s) ‘La Boheme.’ That was a very life-changing experience.”

She decided to pursue opera seriously, moving back to Los Angeles and completing a master’s degree in music at the University of Southern California in 1980. She entered the San Francisco Opera Merola training program for young singers in 1981.

She has studied with Martial Singher, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Gwendolyn Koldofsky and Nina Hinson. She continues vocal studies in New York with Ruth Falcon.

“It’s really important to have someone you check in with vocally,” she said. “I feel that our responsibility (as singers) is to study our whole careers and refine our repertory.”

Golden joined the New York City Opera in 1985 and began singing “mostly lyric repertory”--Mimi in “Boheme,” Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust,” Zerlina in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” among other roles.

She was seen locally during the NYCO’s two stints at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, as Micaela in Bizet’s “Carmen” in 1987, and as the Second Lady in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote” and as Natalie (a.k.a. Valencienne) in Lehar’s “The Merry Widow” in 1989.

All along, she has mixed recital work with opera because “in this country, the music world being what it is, versatility is a premium.”

She will sing her first Countess in Mozart’s “Le nozze di Figaro” in 1991. “I will go to try it out in Anchorage, Alaska, to work out the kinks,” she said.

There is an opera company in Anchorage?

“Yes, it puts on four productions a year. It’s a company in which singers can go to try out roles in a risk-free environment, to try out new directions. Places like Anchorage are perfect. It has a 2,500-seat theater, an enthusiastic audience. . . .

“In big cities, you do repertory you’ve done quite extensively.”

Golden is branching out to Europe, as well, “mostly for guest engagements, to expand my repertory, not to relocate there.

“I long for other opportunities, but not to the exclusion of leaving my native shores,” she said.

Golden said she approaches opera “architecturally” because of her early start as a pianist. “I’ll play through a score, singing on open vowels to get a feeling of the musical line. But I’ll also start studying the source--whether a play, libretto or novel--and read about the literary conception of the character.

“At the point I really start working with the music, learning the text and the music together, the character takes shape with the musical level. I start to really think about the character’s motivation, so that the audience then has a sense of real life or feeling about them. . . . Composers such as Mozart or Puccini have so much going on with the character.”

Working with a stage director “becomes a negotiation process,” Golden said. “There are always ones that are difficult.” She remembers as “most interesting” her performances as Despina in Jonathan Miller’s production of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 1982.

“I sang one recitative eight different ways until he said, ‘That’s the one!’ That was really a challenge. He didn’t want Despina to be a prim, French maid, but very earthy, dominant, someone who tells the ladies how to deal with men.”

Golden’s problem, she said, was that she “was still making her a little too cute. He said, ‘more earthy, more knowledgeable, more salt of the earth.’ So I edged away from the cute, flirtatious approach. It was a matter of degrees.

“So he cast me as very frumpy--instead of being pretty and cute--and holding a dishrag in my hand the whole time!”

Ruth Golden will be soprano soloist with the Master Chorale of Orange County in Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem,” William Hall conducting, Friday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Rodney Gilfry will be baritone soloist. Hall also will conduct Brahms’ “Schicksalslied.” Tickets: $12.50 to $35. Information: (714) 556-6262.

ANY DOUBTS, by the way, that the Master Chorale would have an orchestra for its program Friday were dispelled late Monday when the organization deposited a cashier’s check for $21,000 to cover musicians’ fees with the Orange County Musicians Assn., Local No. 7 of the American Federation of Musicians, according to Frank Amoss, president of the local.

The Pacific Symphony, originally announced for the concert, had pulled out because the Master Chorale still owed the orchestra $37,000 for concerts Oct. 27 and Dec. 3. The chorale then said it would assemble its own orchestra, through the union. But union officials said that they would require a bond for the entire amount of musicians’ salaries for Friday’s concert, to be posted before the first rehearsal.

Meanwhile, the chorale has paid the Pacific $5,000 of its debt, according to Randy Johnson, president of the Pacific’s board of directors.

No repayment schedule has been worked out but, Johnson said Tuesday, “I feel satisfied that the Master Chorale is doing everything it reasonably can in order to pay off this debt. I have every confidence that we are going to get paid. . . .

“If you go back over a five-year period, there isn’t an arts organization in the county that hasn’t had financial trouble at one time or another. In this instance it happens to be the Master Chorale.”

AND DON’T BE SURPRISED if you notice microphones hanging above the stage at Friday’s Master Chorale concert--and at future concerts by the Master Chorale and the Pacific Chorale. The organizations will be taping the concerts for archival or grant-getting purposes.

YOUNG LOCAL classical or popular musicians can try for up to $1,500 in cash awards through the 1990 B. Douglas Sawtelle Musical Scholarship Competition, being sponsored by the Orange County Musicians’ Assn., Local No. 7 of the American Federation of Musicians. A separate $500 Mick Price Scholarship will be awarded to a young jazz musician.

All applicants must be Orange County residents and music majors either in their senior year of high school or enrolled in a college or junior college as of fall 1990. Awards are for instrumental musicians only (as opposed to vocalists, conductors or composers). Winners will be invited to appear in a public recital, to be announced.

The deadline for application is March 16. Information: (714) 546-8166.