Orange County Performing Arts Center 5th Anniversary : Pacific Symphony, Philharmonic Society Tuning Up for Merger : Music: Board members believe that the union will streamline fund-raising while expanding subscribers.

A long-discussed merger of two of the county’s major classical music organizations, the Pacific Symphony and the Orange County Philharmonic Society, appears to be moving forward rapidly with the full blessings of the presidents of each group’s board of directors.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s opening in Costa Mesa five years ago upped the ante considerably for local groups that either perform or present programs, and at various points since then various groups using the hall have discussed merging as a way of streamlining to raise funds more effectively.

The most notable merger attempt was made by the two community choirs that each present short subscription series at the Center, the Pacific Chorale and the Master Chorale of Orange County. But 10 months of negotiations fell apart in September of 1988 over the issue of who would lead the combined chorale.

The merger of the 13-year-old Pacific Symphony, which is the county’s largest orchestra, and the 37-year-old Philharmonic Society, which books touring musicians into the Center and other halls, looks to be on track--so much so that Philharmonic Society board President William P. Conlin predicts it will be “an accomplished fact by a year from now.”

Informal until this week, merger talks reached a new level Wednesday when the subject was brought up for the first time as a discussion item before the orchestra board. It comes before the Philharmonic Society board for the first time on Monday. While no formal action is expected, “we’ll strive to get as much support from the board as we can at that meeting,” Conlin said.

Pacific Symphony board president G. Randolph Johnson said the two groups together could be a more potent force on the fund-raising scene and even could build a bigger overall audience for classical music in the county.

The Philharmonic Society has seen its budget grow from $885,000 in 1985 to $2.6 million in 1990-91. The Pacific Symphony budget has quintupled since the opening of the Center, where, in addition to offering its own classical and pops series, it also serves as the pit orchestra for most visiting ballet companies. For the last several years, the orchestra also has presented its own summer series at Irvine Meadows.

But such rapid growth “certainly put a great deal of demand on the organization, artistically and financially,” according to Louis Spisto, the orchestra’s executive director. The Pacific’s growth outstripped its ability to raise funds, Spisto said, especially during a time of recession: It closed out its latest fiscal year with an accumulated deficit of $800,000. The Philharmonic Society ended the 1990-91 fiscal year with a $275,000 deficit.

Johnson believes that separately, each of the two organizations has grown to its limits. “I don’t think you can take the existing core of classical music subscribers and expand it” without a merger, he said. But he believes the potential for expansion certainly is there: He asserted that metropolises the size of Orange County commonly support 60 or more classical orchestral concerts a year, about twice as many as the Pacific Symphony and the Philharmonic Society combined.

A merger, he continued, not only would build a more formidable fund-raising organization but would allow a unified subscription marketing effort while helping to eliminate lingering audience and donor confusion over the mission of the two groups.

“That whole issue of mission, because of the fact that we are two organizations, has been diluted,” Johnson said. The question of mission has been complicated further by the presence of the Performing Arts Center itself: Though it is simply a rental hall used by the two organizations, several in the community mistakenly believe that the Center actually presents the Pacific and Philharmonic Society concerts. The groups are independent of the Center. (See accompanying story).

Conlin agreed that a merger would help “clarify confusion in the community about who does what. Fund-raising is a challenging enough process” without such confusion, he said.

The executive directors of the orchestra and the Philharmonic Society offered muted support for the merger plan.

“It’s come up many times in the last five years. It’s an issue that’s very alive right now,” said the Philharmonic Society’s Erich Vollmer. “It is a subject that deserves serious scrutiny.”

“The concept has very strong merits,” said the Pacific’s Spisto. “Anything that could support the growth of the orchestra, that’s what I’m for.”

Specifics of how a merger would work have yet to be determined. But staff reductions, to eliminate duplicated effort, are likely and probably would extend to the top of the organizations: Either Vollmer or Spisto, or both, might lose his job.