O.C. MUSIC : DiChiera Defends Opera Pacific : General director says that he’s comfortable with company’s role and that problems are beyond the opera’s control.

Five years after Opera Pacific was formed to coincide with the opening of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, it seems reasonable to raise a key question: Does the company offer the best--or even the most--opera that Orange County has a right to expect?

“There are productions I’m very pleased with and others that didn’t come up to, well, what I had hoped them to be,” general director David DiChiera, who recently announced his sixth season, said in an interview.

“I see things more in terms of institution-building. My biggest challenge and goal is to create an institution that is a resource for a community, particularly for a community that is new in having cultural institutions. Both the (Pacific) Symphony and the Opera are young institutions in a young community.”

In enumerating the difficulties he has in meeting this “challenge and goal,” DiChiera faulted the out-of-town press for what he considers a negative “mind-set.”

“I believe there is already a kind of a mind-set about what can happen in Orange County that colors a lot of reviews from the Los Angeles media,” he said. “My colleagues have all expressed that feeling, that there is a whole kind, a sense of ‘What could actually be done of quality in Orange County? It’s not a major urban center. It’s . . . provincial.’ ”

At the top of his list of problems, though, was scheduling at the Center.

Next season, Opera Pacific will offer five productions--one a double bill--plus a benefit recital by tenor Placido Domingo at the Center for a total of 21 performances there. This contrasts favorably with such area counterparts as the San Diego Opera, which offered 23 performances of five operas this season, and Long Beach Opera, which gave only 10 performances of three operas.

But DiChiera said the Center offers no opportunity for growth. “There just isn’t more time . . . the Center has committed to us seven weeks. That’s been pretty much the max. Given all the players involved in this facility. . . . I believe that’s about what we’ll be able to do, until something is changed. That’s the reality we’re dealing with.

“I think that maybe we’ll find another room for (an additional production), maybe a summer thing.” But until there is another facility that can accommodate the Symphony and the Orange County Philharmonic Society’s concerts (“the single-night events”), he doesn’t think it’s possible to do six or eight productions, like the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

Opera Pacific rents the Center by the week at a rate of $37,500. Usually, that buys rehearsal space as well as the main stage. But next season, rehearsal space will be “an incredible problem,” DiChiera said.

In February, when the troupe is alternating two productions over a three-week period, the American Ballet Theatre will have been in residence two weeks before, he explained. “They are going to need a great deal of the backstage facility, and so here we are trying to rehearse (Kalman’s) ‘Gypsy Princess’ and (Saint-Saens’) ‘Samson et Dalila’ and having far less space than we ever had. So we’re going to have to find some other space outside of the Center.”

Alternating the productions “is not ideal for our audiences,” he said. “They don’t like coming a week apart. It’s so compact. But again, that is a result of the facility problem. Everything we do in essence goes back to the necessity of dealing with the reality of our time in the theater.”

“Juggling the Center’s complex and crowded schedule to best meet everyone’s rehearsal and performance needs is a continuing challenge,” said a spokesman for the hall. “The Center has always worked very hard to provide Opera Pacific and other major regional arts organizations preference in the dates they request. Nevertheless, our rehearsal and performance space is a finite resource.”

A further problem on DiChiera’s list is office space. Though Opera Pacific rents plush offices in the Center Tower Building at a bargain rate (“These offices are actually being underwritten for us by the Warmington Co. . . . which needed to get out because they have another building of their own,” said DiChiera), they are not really sufficient for the opera troupe’s needs.

“We don’t need the quality of this space,” DiChiera said. “What we need is a place that can be ours . . . a facility that can have all of our offices, rehearsal space, a small performance space where people can come and we can do recitals and do workshop things and so forth. It’s very difficult (to find that) in Orange County. In some places, it’s easier to find because older communities might have an old warehouse or an old building that’s no longer in use.”

Criticisms leveled at Opera Pacific have ranged from DiChiera’s absence for much of the year (he is also general director of the Michigan Opera Theatre and the Dayton Opera) to the level of singers he has presented here.

“If we were doing eight productions,” he said, “I would be here more.”

Meanwhile, DiChiera insists that he brings singers of “international merit” to Orange County.

“I think Tim Noble, Leona Mitchell and Taro Ichihara are all international artists. . . . I’d love to sit down and talk about some of the artists who are appearing in our neighbor companies. Who are they? Tell me what artists are singing in San Diego that are of a different scope or level. Who is there--or in Los Angeles, except for Placido, that are of a different level?”

Singers in the second casts have complained about insufficient rehearsal time. But, DiChiera said, “if you’ve ever looked at the rehearsal schedule of some of the companies that have multiple casts, like New York City Opera, often the second and third casts never have an orchestra rehearsal. We have two dress rehearsals for each production so that each cast has a complete dress rehearsal.”

Critics have also accused Opera Pacific of relying on borrowed and flimsy sets and stale staging concepts and of offering limited repertory.

DiChiera countered that his set for “A Masked Ball,” presented at the Center at the end of February, “was designed for the Kennedy Center and is very elaborate.

“Because ‘Masked Ball’ is a very large and very cumbersome set,” he continued, “I needed a second production that was more of a unit set. I could not alternate the equivalent of two ‘Masked Balls’ simply because of the facility that was available to us.

“It will be the same thing next year when I do ‘Samson and Dalila,’ which has an incredibly large and complex set. So the production that I will design and use for ‘Gypsy Princess’ needs to be (portable) . . . otherwise, the two productions can’t live together in the house. It’s just a matter of working with whatever resources we have.”

He defended his stand-and-sing staging concepts as “traditional.”

“One could do an opera with unknown singers, one can do it in English, can do very interesting things,” he added. “But then you don’t have an opera with singers who are of a certain international stature.”

As for expanding repertory beyond the Italian and French works done over the past five years, DiChiera said, “We’ll eventually do German repertory. Within the next five years, we’ll start moving into something else. . . . (But) every time we cover a new base, we lose an old base, when you’re doing a limited number of productions.”