MUSIC : Love of Opera : Arts group banking that traveling production of ‘La Boheme’ will go over big in Santa Clarita.

Members of the Santa Clarita Arts Council are betting their modest bank account that Sunday’s production of “La Boheme” by the Western Opera Theater will produce a groundswell of support.

The council’s president-elect, Newhall businessman Richard Smykle, says the lovely music in Puccini’s opera, to be performed in English, makes it an odds-on favorite to capture the hearts of Santa Clarita Valley residents.

In his cramped Newhall nursing employment agency, he finally abandons trying to express his feelings about the opera and instead sings one of its most poignant arias.

“It flows so beautifully,” says Smykle, a tenor who for several years appeared with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera in New York during the ‘60s. “It stirs the soul.”

The Western Opera Theater, the traveling company of the San Francisco Opera Center, will perform at 3 p.m. Sunday at Hart High School Auditorium. The company travels to about 50 cities each season.

The 4-year-old council is an all-volunteer group of about 120 active members. It did well with its first Western Opera Theater performance of “Carmen” in 1990. The group, however, lost about $3,000 on a 1992 performance of “La Traviata,” which cost about $17,000 to mount.

Council members expect “Boheme” to cost as much and said they will need to fill at least 800 of the 1,000 seats in the Hart auditorium to pay for the opera and to support the group’s more modest activities during the year. These include back-yard soirees and a quarterly newsletter, Smykle said.

If they run short, he said, the bank account will surely run dry, and future activities may have to be shelved.

Although a solid turnout would temporarily sustain the group, Smykle said, council memberships, which cost $25 a year, will have to quadruple in the future to support a more comprehensive events calendar for the Santa Clarita Valley’s 150,000 residents.

In the past, the council has relied mainly on periodic financial support from the city of Santa Clarita, which this year gave the group $10,000. “Our goal is to eventually become self-supporting,” Smykle said.

“La Boheme” concerns the lives of four struggling artists in Paris during the 1830s and centers on the tragic love story of Rodolfo, a poet and a fiery romantic, and Mimi, a lovely and trusting young seamstress.

In Act I, the audience is introduced to the artists, who though impoverished, share a zest for life, and to Rodolfo’s and Mimi’s budding romance. The opera climaxes in tragedy, as Rodolfo and his friends comfort the dying Mimi.

Current Council President Alan Barbakow, a Newhall orthodontist, architectural designer and sculptor, says: “No opera in my mind has such fullness. There’s love, there’s death, there’s intimacy, there’s poverty. There’s a celebration of life.”

One council member, Mimi Hiller, is a testament to the work’s magnetism. In 1982, she legally changed her name to Mimi. At first, she simply used the name during computer correspondence with a friend. But it stuck. So did memories of an opera that had sent chills through her each time she heard it.

“The entire opera is like a magic formula, and each of its individual components are bonded together like steel,” said Hiller, a cellist who has performed in several small productions of “Boheme.” “I always cried at the end of each performance. You know, it is very difficult to play the cello with tears in your eyes.”

Patrick Summers, music director with the San Francisco Opera Center and liaison for the Western Opera Theater, says first-time opera-goers will particularly enjoy “the great contrast between the comic and the tragic” in the opera.

“I have done more than 200 performances of “La Boheme,” and it is never tiring to me,” he said. “The music is so wonderful, so compact, and it tells the story in such a perfect way.”

Western Opera Theater has performed nationally since 1967, and has made brief forays to Japan, China and Canada. Performers, who are selected in national auditions, will be backed Sunday by Western’s 30-piece orchestra.

Barbakow said he hopes that more publicity than the group had for “Traviata” and shifting the performance date from a weeknight to a weekend will attract more people and create more visibility for the council.

“I think art is a very important aspect of a community’s overall health,” Barbakow said. “If you increase the art base in a community, I believe you substantially increase its overall potential to grow in a positive way.”

Where and When What: Puccini’s “La Boheme” by the Western Opera Theater of the San Francisco Opera Center. Location: Hart High School Auditorium, 24825 Newhall Ave., Newhall. Hours: 3 p.m. Sunday. Running time: 2 1/2 hours Price: $25 to $40. $20 for seniors, students; $100 for special “benefactor” tickets that include an after-performance party. Call: (805) 259-1172.