Master Chorale to Start Season With Eye-Opener : Music: The group hopes to raise AIDS awareness with a memorial concert tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

An AIDS memorial concert is one thing, an AIDS memorial concert as a season opener is another. But an AIDS memorial concert at the Orange County Performing Arts Center--where they only started allowing coffee last season--might seem downright revolutionary.

Yet that’s how and where the Master Chorale of Orange County opens its 39th season tonight.

Is the center’s yearling director Tom Tomlinson mending more fences? Would such a concert have been possible under former director Tom Kendrick?

“Actually, I don’t think (Kendrick) would have had a choice in the matter,” said William Hall, the chorale’s music director. “We’re local, but we’re an outside group--we just rent the center.” Still--and although this won’t be the first AIDS-related program in the building (the Pacific Symphony played John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 there in 1991)--Hall notes that “for some reason, Orange County has not really been in the mainstream of taking hold of some of these awful diseases. I just felt it was time.”

Tomlinson did improve the chorale’s play dates (along with ordering the java): The group has three Saturdays at the center this year. Tonight’s program includes Faure’s Requiem with soprano Rebecca Semanie and baritone Douglas Lawrence as soloists. The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles will join the men of the Master Chorale for the first half of the concert, which is devoted to Ned Rorem’s “Love Alone” and Brahms’ “Alto Rhapsody” with mezzo-soprano Wendy Hillhouse.

The decidedly seasonal season, dubbed “Love and War,” continues Dec. 10 with “Reflections of Christmas” at the center and Feb. 12 when “A Valentine’s Gift” will feature Romantic (in both the historic and amorous senses) melodies by Brahms, Schumann and Schubert at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. The chorale will mark Armed Forces Day, May 20, back at the center with Benjamin Britten’s “War” Requiem.

Hall commented on each of the works on the AIDS program:

* Faure: “I’ve performed the Faure Requiem probably 40 or 50 times around the world, but because I’d performed it so often with other groups, (I’d never done it) with the Master Chorale. But I was looking for something very lyric, very melodic, that would immediately reach anyone . . . (and people would) immediately be amazed at how beautiful it is.”

* Rorem: “I worked briefly with Ned Rorem (on ‘Love Alone’), and when we lined up before the concert, I had 12 men, and he said, ‘Where’s the rest of the choir?’ The work is based on a very intimate poem about two people very much in love and one speaking about his sorrow--I think of it as a chamber work. Now we’re doing it with 190 men--the way Ned wanted it done.”

When asked about Brahms’ “Alto Rhapsody,” which was written shortly after the deaths of two of the composer’s close friends, Hall recited excerpts from Goethe’s text:

Who will heal the pangs

Of him for whom balsam turned to poison?

Who drank hatred of mankind

From the fullness of love . . .

If there is on your psalter,

Father of Love, a tone

That will reach his ear,

Revive then his heart!

“Those great lines speak to all of us, but very differently to all of us,” Hall said. “I recently was asked why I chose the ‘Alto Rhapsody’ for this concert. How could you not choose the ‘Alto Rhapsody’?

“It doesn’t make a difference if it’s Orange County or Los Angeles or anywhere else--people are divided about how they feel (about AIDS). I wanted people to come to grips with their faith and understanding and find that music can take them beyond some of their hesitation.

“There is genuine love and excitement over this concert,” he added. “Where people have been afraid to express that (love), here is a way they can express it and feel good about themselves.”

To Hall, there is nothing abstract about the impact of AIDS. “I’ve been afraid to count over the years,” he said. “We have a soprano in the group who lost her son recently. We (in the musical community at large) have lost so many people to this dreaded disease. To them, I thought it was time to say thank you for your time and your talent and your gifts.”

* William Hall leads the Master Chorale of Orange County and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles in an AIDS memorial concert tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The program: Works by Ned Rorem, Brahms and Faure. 8 p.m. $15 to $40. (714) 556-2787.