Orchestra Cuts Back on Concerts : Music: The Orange County Symphony, which is operating at a deficit, will offer one less program in 1992-93 season.

In the wake of the demise of the South Coast Symphony, the county’s only other small-budget orchestra--the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove--is tightening its belt and at the same time trying to reach out to new audiences and supporters.

Saddled with a deficit between $50,000 and $60,000, the OCSGG will play only three concerts in 1992-93, one fewer than last season. However, the orchestra is offering its first subscription program outside its home base of Garden Grove, opening its season at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim.

The cutback in the number of concerts is “really a belt-tightening effort,” Yaakov Dvir-Djerassi, general manager of the orchestra, said Monday. “That is what we have to do right now, like everyone else.”

But because the Leo Freedman Foundation, which owns the Celebrity Theatre, is helping to underwrite the opening concert, the move to Anaheim “is not a big risk for us,” Dvir-Djerassi said.

“It’s part of an expansion plan, a trial to see how it works. We are going there to focus on having a better source of sponsor-ship or a new target audience.”

The South Coast Symphony, which had been based in Costa Mesa, closed down on June 28 after months of insufficient ticket sales and corporate support.

The OCSGG (previously known as the Garden Grove Symphony) survived a fiscal crisis in March when it announced an accumulated deficit of $121,000 resulting from six years of free outdoor summer concerts, an overly ambitious expansion of its 1988-89 season to five classical and two pops concerts, and a money-losing New Year’s Eve gala in 1988.

The organization needed an immediate $30,000 to hold its season-ending concert in May. It got the money--and another $40,000. But a large deficit remains.

The budget for the new season will be approximately $290,000, Dvir-Djerassi said. In the past, about 60% of the budget has come from corporate grants and individual donations. The remainder has to come from the box office.

Concerts at the 1,500-seat Don Wash Auditorium in Garden Grove averaged more than 85% capacity last season, about the same as the year before, Dvir-Djerassi said. The group has approximately 500 subscribers, about 80% of whom have renewed so far, he added.

Board president Lorraine Reafsnyder, who took over on June 22, said fund-raising efforts and other plans to bring down the deficit are “in the planning stages.”

Though Anaheim City Manager James D. Ruth issued a prepared statement that “we would like to see the symphony become a regular fixture in Anaheim,” Reafsnyder stressed that the concert at the Celebrity “doesn’t mean we are leaving Garden Grove in the lurch. It’s part of an effort to expand, to make other people aware of us.”

The city of Garden Grove will give the orchestra $15,000, an increase of $3,000 over this year, according to Reafsnyder.

About 700 of the Celebrity’s 2,500 seats will be removed to accommodate the orchestra. The Freedman Foundation is paying for the remodeling.

The Sept. 25 Anaheim concert will be led by Philippe Bender, music director of the Orchestre Regional de Cannes, France. Bender conducted the Garden Grove Symphony once before, in 1990.

A concert at the Don Wash Auditorium Nov. 14 will enlist violin virtuoso and pedagogue Oleh Krysa as soloist in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Music director Edward Peterson will conduct.

The third concert, Feb. 6 at the Don Wash Auditorium, will be a Hoffnung “humor in classical music” program. Predating a similar effort by Peter Schickele with his P.D.Q. Bach concert series, the popular Hoffnung Festival programs began in the 1950s in London. They grew out of a series of cartoons by British artist and humorist Gerard Hoffnung and are known for their light wit and expert spoofing of classical music.

The Feb. 6 program was suggested by the success of a pops concert in June of last year. That concert, held at the Pearson Park Amphitheatre in Anaheim, also prompted orchestra officials to consider expanding beyond Garden Grove.

In other news, the orchestra board announced that it will meet Aug. 17 to decide whether to appeal the California Arts Council’s recent reduction of the orchestra’s rating, to 2-plus out of a possible 4. The ratings are used to determine how much state money an organization will receive. Normally, organizations ranked below 3-minus are not funded.