O.C. MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Conductor Pushes Opera Pacific to a Bolder ‘Boheme’

For Steven Mercurio, the biggest challenge in conducting Puccini’s “La Boheme” for Opera Pacific will be to inspire the singers “to be dangerous.”

“You want them to extend themselves to the point where you wonder if it’s all actually going to happen, that it’s going to push the dramatic limits,” he said in a recent interview in the restaurant at his hotel.

That degree of expressivity is hard to achieve, he conceded, but vital. “Otherwise, it becomes very timid. Verismo opera just can’t be timid.”

Mercurio, 36, knows firsthand about the realistic, passionate tradition that is verismo . He grew up in a close-knit New York family--Italian on his father’s side and Jewish on his mother’s. “They’re high-speed ethnic,” he said.

He also has worked extensively with composer Gian Carlo Menotti, one of the last of the Romantic- verismo composers. (In July, Menotti appointed him music director of the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, which begins next summer.)

Most of what Mercurio conducts is opera, although he was associate conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 1986 to 1989 and continues to make concert appearances regularly.

He was an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera from 1987 to 1990 and was made principal conductor of the Opera Company of Philadelphia in 1991. He also prepared the premiere of his friend John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles” for the Met in December. Conducting opera, Mercurio said, is “the biggest musical challenge” because of “taking all these unlike personalities and somehow focusing them and helping them do something that’s supernatural.

“Singing is devastatingly difficult. It’s like running around on stage with your clothes off. People don’t realize how difficult it is to expose yourself like that. For me to be a support to them, to help them, is already a challenge. Then to bring the orchestra in and work with the director and lighting designer and just the whole thing--opera conducting is the greatest challenge, the most rewarding.”

Although there’s nothing particularly problematic “from a technical standpoint” in “Boheme,” which opens Saturday, to make the characters “eccentric and identifiable and to reach the level of passion that verismo demands is very difficult,” he said.

“It’s very difficult to open your soul that far. People are not accustomed to it. Sometimes it even makes them nervous in the audience.”

Of course, the conductor doesn’t make the magic happen by himself. “It’s a collaborative effort, without a doubt,” Mercurio said. So he’s grateful that he’s worked with “Boheme” stage director Roman Terleckyj and most of the cast before.

He knows, as a result, he will not have to struggle with a director who wants to dominate the production, as he feels many do these days, by relocating the action and over-managing the singers.

“It’s really a conceit to try and do that because then you’re not making them responsible for their own physical gestures, which are connected to the music,” Mercurio said. “You could spend 40 years doing that. But it doesn’t make the piece any better.”

Mercurio says that directors feel impelled to make changes because “not enough new operas are being done. If people’s fantasies were being aroused on a regular basis every year in one or two new operas, then there wouldn’t be a desire to take ‘Rigoletto’ and put it in Nazi Germany or something like (that),” he said.

“But since there aren’t any new operas, in order to create the sensation of newness, unfortunately, directors have gone to placing productions elsewhere, for shock sake. But, believe me, just doing an opera correctly and making the composer’s and librettist’s intentions clear already is a creative act.”

A composer as well as a conductor, Mercurio is trying to do his part to contribute to the repertory. When he composes, moreover, he’s not afraid to think big and to think personal.

He wrote his “For Lost Loved Ones” in 1984 for his brother Paul, who “just disappeared about 15 years ago,” he said.

“He went to see some friends with the family junky car and was never heard from again,” Mercurio said. “It’s not as if he ran away. I’m talking about a 20-year-old, not about a little child. He had money in the bank, which he didn’t take. No clothes were taken. And the car was never found. It was a piece of junk. He just disappeared.”

The work received its premiere by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic in 1991. Some reviews, Mercurio conceded, were “pretty brutal.”

“Unfortunately, a lot of critics seem to have an agenda of what they think contemporary music should sound like,” he said. “I don’t hide my influences, and that somehow seemed to be the whole point.

“My style has evolved as a composer. Does that mean Beethoven should have thrown away his first two symphonies, or that Puccini should have thrown away his first three operas? You evolve, and I allow myself to evolve.”

“There were a few nice reviews, too,” he added. “But for any given piece in the world, you can find a premiere that has gotten killed by somebody. It’s going to happen. It hurt only in that the reviewers never mentioned the audience response, and that was phenomenal.”

* Steven Mercurio will conduct Puccini’s “La Boheme” for Opera Pacific on Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (Other performances are Sept. 16, 18 and 19 at 8 p.m.; and Sept. 20 at 2 p.m. $15 to $75. (714) 979-7000.

ORCHESTRA PRESIDENT RESPONDS: Lorraine Reafsnyder, chairman of the Orange County Symphony board, has taken issue with Yaakov Dvir-Djerassi’s assertion that he was fired last week as general manager of the orchestra because of “some personal frictions” between the two of them. “That is not true,” Reafsnyder said. “It was not personal friction, but friction between the board and him. We all feel that Yaakov is a really great guy, but it came down to a philosophical disagreement over management principles, operational and management differences. My sentiments echo those of the board.”

Reached Tuesday, Dvir-Djerassi countered: “That’s absolutely wrong. I didn’t have any friction with the board members.”