Marketing the Opera Orchestra : Music: Founder Gualtiero Negrini leads the ensemble’s first season of concert opera--sung without sets or costumes--this weekend at the Wilshire-Ebell.

As founder and conductor of the Opera Orchestra of Los Angeles, the new ensemble making its debut this weekend at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre with performances of Verdi’s “Attila,” Gualtiero Negrini acknowledges the importance of promotion, publicity and gimmicks.

For the last four years, Negrini has occupied the conspicuous tenor part of Ubaldo Piangi, in the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber production of “Phantom of the Opera” at the Ahmanson Theatre of the Music Center.

He joined the cast in May, 1989; when the show closes at the end of August, Negrini will have sung in more than 1,750 performances. Like anyone who’s worked on a Lloyd Webber show, Negrini is well-versed in the value of marketing. But he also claims to know what is most important.

Wearing an Opera Orchestra of Los Angeles T-shirt emblazoned in green and blue, the 32-year-old tenor-conductor, greeting a visitor to his home in Glendale, denigrates his own marketing devices, saying, “Fancy brochures, a catchy logo and company T-shirts don’t make opera. Voices do.”

And voices are what music director Negrini promises for his organization’s first season of concert opera--unstaged opera sung without sets or costumes.

Negrini’s hopes for the company are substantial: He is partially funding his own operatic destiny with money earned from “Phantom.”

After three performances of “Attila,” Friday through Sunday nights, Negrini and the orchestra’s co-founder, Donald P. Rivers, have scheduled three performances in October of Tchaikovsky’s “Evgeny Onegin” with members of the Bolshoi Opera in some of the leading roles.

Then follow two performances of Puccini’s “Turandot” in Pasadena Civic Auditorium in February, with the only two famous names on the season’s roster, Bulgarian soprano Ghena Dimitrova (in the title role) and Italian tenor Giuliano Ciannella (as Calaf), and an operatic recital-with-orchestra by American tenor Jerry Hadley in July, 1994.

It’s no big deal, Negrini claims, that at this early age he should be conducting his own orchestra, an ensemble he has put together with his own labors. Everything in his musical life, he thinks, has led logically up to this point.

“I’ve conducted since the age of 13, and always knew that’s what I would do eventually,” says the Los Angeles-born musician, a professional singer and voice coach of Italian parentage.”

The young conductor, veteran tenor and voice teacher names his partner, Donald Rivers, as the other half of his management team; Rivers’ title is general director.

Rivers, an attorney, describes himself as a specialist in starting-up businesses--”Everything from manufacturing to import/export to venture capital. And I’ve been in promotion since I was a kid,” he says.

“The reason we did not begin as a nonprofit corporation,” Rivers explains, “was the cost of incorporating. It takes a lot of money. But soon, probably in the next few months, we will start that process.”

He says the cost of this first season, during which the orchestra is scheduled to give nine performances, will probably come to $750,000, an amount already underwritten by the founders.

“For the time being, we are counting on box-office receipts to carry us forward.”

The musical impetus, of course, comes from the music director, who has enlisted Italian coach and conductor Walter Baracchi as artistic adviser. A former assistant conductor at both the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan and Lyric Opera of Chicago, Baracchi has been Negrini’s mentor for more than a decade.

Before that, the fledgling singer-conductor studied under professors at USC and at Cal State Long Beach and with the late Fritz Zweig. One of four sons born to two former singers--”My brothers all sing, my parents sang, and all four grandparents sang,” he says--Negrini grew up in Los Angeles, both on the East Side and in Silver Lake.

His hopes for the company are not just personal: “Obviously, I’m furthering my own career as an opera conductor, a field in which I already have experience. But I feel there is an audience for operatic works which either haven’t been seen here, or have been largely neglected.”

Negrini and Rivers have already begun to make plans and to research availabilities for coming years, operatic casting being a business that is booked far in advance, and his wish list includes Verdi’s “Aida,” Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” Wagner’s “Rienzi,” Meyerbeer’s “L’Africaine,” Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims” . . .

Having cast three singers from the Bolshoi Opera for the two scheduled performances of “Onegin” (the title role will be sung by American baritone Martin Wright) and Dimitrova and Ciannella, for “Turandot,” Negrini offers relatively unknown singers for the cast of “Attila.”

The three principals are Americans: baritone Rush Tully in the title role; prize-winning soprano Michelle Harman-Gulick as Odabella--at the middle performance, Saturday, Joann Zajac will sing the role--and tenor Baldo dal Ponte as Foresto. Negrini himself has prepared the chorus.