O.C. MUSIC AND DANCE / CHRIS PASLES : Few Risks Taken, and With Mixed Results : The Year in Review. Despite a few premieres, local music and dance scenes were conservative.

In 1993, Orange County audiences saw the last ballet choreographed by Agnes de Mille and the first full-length ballet by Kevin McKenzie, artistic director of American Ballet Theatre.

They heard the premiere performances of a memorial to a young man killed in a freeway accident and an optimistic celebration of life in response to the Los Angeles riots.

Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair got to guest conduct the New York Philharmonic for the first time, and William Hall, director of the Master Chorale of Orange County, squared off for the first time against Whoopi Goldberg, leading the choral competition against her group in the movie “Sister Act II.” Hall lost. But the deck was stacked.

A brand new facility--the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--opened in January, allowing county residents to multiply their arts options.

Despite such highlights and premieres, dance and music in Orange County remained generally unadventurous and conservative. Opera in particular has gone nowhere.

This might be partly a mixed blessing, however, considering how the big-city boys--Peter Martins of New York City Ballet and McKenzie of ABT--savaged two beloved Tchaikovsky ballet scores for the productions they brought of “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Nutcracker,” respectively, to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Martins cut the opulent, lengthy score of “The Sleeping Beauty” to about 2 1/2 hours in streamlining the action. When Orange County saw the controversial results in October, Times dance critic Martin Bernheimer summed it up perfectly as “a terrific ballet for the tired businessperson.”

Fortunately, the company engagement also included five programs of repertory by George Balanchine.

McKenzie treated the score of “Nutcracker” even worse, highhandedly making internal musical cuts, moving some sections around and actually introducing other music. The ballet world has a dishonorable history of being cavalier with its scores; imagine the ruckus that would arise if anyone took similar freedoms with a Tchaikovsky symphony or even one of his suites?

The music interpolated into Act I of the “Nutcracker” came from Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3, but of course it didn’t fit.

Orange County got what was billed as its world premiere in December. Some slight changes were made when the “Nutcracker” moved to Los Angeles a few weeks later. Two New York critics who had seen it at the center suggested it needs more work before it arrives in the Big Apple in May. . . .

McKenzie had only been artistic director for a few months when ABT visited the center at the beginning of the year, bringing “Giselle” and, among other shorter repertory, Agnes de Mille’s last ballet, “The Other.”

A reworking of some of her earlier allegories about love, death and sacrifice, De Mille’s ballet received decidedly mixed reviews. But in a minority opinion, it was a generous, luminous farewell to life. As it turned out, De Mille died Oct. 7 at age 88.

Rock star Prince never played the Performing Arts Center--that kind of rock act will probably never be allowed in--but his music blasted through those hallowed halls as accompaniment to the Joffrey Ballet’s raucous, scattershot “Billboards” in July.

Did anyone else spend more than half the program with their hands over their ears? The audience’s applause was equally deafening.

On the strictly local scene, Ballet Pacifica suffered a devastating loss when its warehouse, with 31 years of costumes and sets, burned to the ground in the Laguna Beach fire. But the company still managed to mount a modest, handsome-looking “Nutcracker” that opened at Cal State L.A. before it moved to the Moulton Theater in Laguna Beach in December.

Except for Mikhail Baryshnikov appearing with his White Oak Dance Project at the center in July, modern dance still surfaced only in colleges and, importantly, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

The plucky theater administration hosted Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (January), Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (March), the Joe Goode Performance Group (May) and the Parsons Dance Company (November). The series was uneven, but the exposure was welcome.

The Irvine theater also was the site for the unique American Indian Dance Theatre (February); the rapt, otherworldly dancing of Ranganiketan, the cultural arts troupe from Manipur, India (April), and the innovative Nrityashree of Vadodara troupe (September).

World dance did appear at the Performing Arts Center, but only because the Orange County Philharmonic Society waged a successful, uphill battle against the (previous) center administration. The society brought in the Krasnoyarsk Dance Company of Siberia (March), Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano (October) and Les Ballets Africains (November).

Dance and new music came together when Beth Burns’ St. Joseph Ballet in Santa Ana celebrated its 10th anniversary to a commissioned score by Cirque du Soleil resident composer Rene Dupere at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in May.

There were several other large-scale music premieres this year. Pacific Symphony composer-in-residence Frank Ticheli wrote “Radiant Voices” in response to the L.A. riots; it was played by the orchestra under St.Clair in February. James Hopkins’ “Songs of Eternity” was sung by the Pacific Chorale, led by John Alexander, in April. The work was commissioned through a donation from longtime Philharmonic Society supporters Dr. Edward and Helen Shanbrom, in part to commemorate David Lee Shanbrom, their son, who was killed in a traffic accident in 1986.

For at least one opera lover, Opera Pacific continued with alarming consistency to reduce the sublime to the vulgar. Somehow, if the principal singers are fine, the stage direction isn’t; if the direction is OK, some of the singers aren’t. The choreography is never any good.

After seven years and an annual budget now of about $5 million, is there any excuse for such provincialism?

Works presented included Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” in January, Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” (February), Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” (March) and Gounod’s “Faust” (September).

From other voices, the Master Chorale of Orange County and the Pacific Chorale continued to go beyond being merely viable institutions; they both made important contributions to the local music scene.

At the other end of the size telescope, chamber music remained healthy. The Pacific Symphony started to play chamber music again after a four-year hiatus, opening a modest two-concert “season” at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana in March.

Meanwhile, the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society continued their robust partnership for a third consecutive year, and the Southwest Chamber Music Society became an indispensable voice for contemporary works, appearing this year for the first time as part of the center’s own four-program Founders Hall chamber-music series.

In varying degrees of artistic and financial health are the Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival, the Cypress Pops Orchestra, the Fullerton Friends of Music, the Harmonia Baroque Players, the Irvine Camerata, the Mozart Camerata, the North Orange County Community Concerts Assn., the Orange County Chamber Orchestra and the Seal Beach Chamber Music Festival.

Individuals continued to play important roles, whether they were musicians. Richard Raub conducted his last concert in May as head of the Orange Coast Singers after an amazing 23 years. He felt it was time for a change. The group remains in limbo since his departure. . . . Also that month, Roger Hickman took over the Orange County Four Seasons Orchestra, which had been moribund after founder Carolyn Broe moved to Tempe, Ariz., in 1991. The orchestra has given two programs.

The Orange County Symphony may have taken its place as the moribund institution of the year, having reached an impasse around August in trying to get financial help from the city of Garden Grove to pay back wages to the musicians. No luck.

Edward Cumming was named assistant conductor of the Pacific Symphony and music director of the new Pacific Symphony Institute at Cal State Fullerton in June. The orchestra also commissioned New York composer Elliott Goldenthal to write a Vietnam War musical memorial, which the Pacific plans to premiere in 1995.

More on the Pacific: In August, Endre Granat resigned after 10 seasons as the Pacific Symphony concertmaster. A series of guest concertmasters is being scrutinized for the job.

Above all, however, were big changes at the top of two of Orange County’s biggest arts organizations.

Erich Vollmer resigned in January as executive director of the Philharmonic Society to take the same position with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Dean Corey, formerly director of development at the San Diego Symphony, became his successor in September.

In June, the center’s first president and chief operating officer, Thomas R. Kendrick, and his wife, general manager Judy O’Dea Morr, announced their resignations, effective Sept. 30. Tom Tomlinson, former director of the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, took over as executive director at the end of September.

Corey and Tomlinson are poised to inaugurate a new era of cooperation in bringing Orange County years of important music and dance.

* In Thursday’s Calendar: The Orange County pop scene was on the decline. Plus, our critics’ best-(and-the-rest)-of-the-year lists.