O.C. MUSIC : Four Seasons Starting Over With Liszt

By all rights, the Orange County Four Seasons Orchestra should play Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at its concert Sunday. It has come, gone, come, gone and now, come again.

Instead, the Irvine-based group will begin its third life with a Mostly Liszt program.

To list the organization’s intricate bloodlines, you’d wind up with something looking like one of those genealogical charts that help you get through a Shakespeare history play.

The orchestra was founded in 1990 by local free-lance violist Carolyn Broe to play baroque and early classical music. Unlike most other orchestra founders, Broe had no interest in conducting. She planned to keep her violist’s position and invite a series of guest conductors to lead the group.

But her Four Seasons only appeared once, with Donald Ambroson conducting in October, 1990, at Santa Ana High School.

When her husband changed jobs, Broe moved a few months later to Scottsdale, Ariz., where she started another Four Seasons Chamber Orchestra. In an effort to keep the Orange County wing going, the group merged with John Elg’s newly formed Irvine Chamber Orchestra, which had never played a concert.

This Four Seasons Orchestra gave its first concert under Elg’s direction in April, 1991, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

The first concert focused as Broe had envisioned it, on music of the baroque: Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. The second included premieres of pieces by Orange County composers John Gerhold and Kenneth Friedenreich in emphasizing 20th-Century music.

Maybe that’s why we never heard of it again. Until now.

The latest incarnation of the orchestra numbers 70 members who will play Sunday under Roger Hickman’s direction at the Irvine theater. Pianist Leonid Kuzmin will be the soloist in two works on the Liszt program.

Hickman, music director of the Los Angeles Classical Ballet, professor of music at Cal State Long Beach and one of the two conductors of the defunct Irvine Symphony, took over in May, 1993.

“Once the Irvine Symphony had stopped functioning, we were left without a nonprofit status,” Hickman, 45, said in a recent phone interview. “I still had the Irvine Youth Symphony and we were looking for umbrella to work with. We also wanted to build a professional orchestra. This was a perfect opportunity.”

The Irvine Symphony was started by then-UCI professor Peter Odegard in 1978, one year before the Pacific Symphony was born. By the late ‘80s, financial troubles had set in. It scheduled and later canceled concerts, ran up a $25,000 debt for its 1987-88 season at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and in 1988 also lost the office space that the Irvine Co. had donated since 1984.

The orchestra survived the financial crisis through corporate and private donations, however, and by the summer of 1989, retired more than 80% of the debt.

Still, at the end of the 1990-91 season, the management decided to call it quits.

The new umbrella organization is called the Four Seasons Music Foundation and it sponsors four organizations--La Primavera, a college-high school orchestra; the Irvine Youth Symphony, an ensemble for younger players; the Irvine Chamber Youth Orchestra, for even younger musicians, and the Four Seasons Orchestra.

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Sunday’s concert is the first under the sponsorship of the new organization. Two more are planned: a Tchaikovsky program at the Irvine Barclay on March 19, and a May 12 concert at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

The budget for all the groups, Hickman said, is about $55,000, most of which is targeted to come from ticket sales, with the rest from individuals and corporations.

“We’re stretching,” Hickman said. “We’ve got enough funds to hire a fully professional orchestra. We’re building bit by bit. But we’re not where we want to go yet.

“The major obstacle is that you want to establish right away the quality of being a group. That takes money,” he said. “But which comes first--quality or a money base to create that quality? It’s not something that happens overnight.”

Hickman was raised in Orange County. He went to Troy High School in Fullerton, UC Irvine and then UC Berkeley to receive a doctorate in musicology in 1972. He taught for six years in Hawaii, where he also played viola in the Honolulu Symphony.

After that he returned to Orange County to teach and study at UCI. There, he worked with Odegard, who hired him for the Irvine Symphony. He now teaches music history at Cal State Long Beach, where he also led the orchestra for about six years.

“The load got pretty heavy,” he said. “So I took over the principal recruiting duties and got some other people to conduct. My primary duties now are in string recruiting and teaching music history classes.

“I do try to keep up my playing,” he added.

His plans for the Four Seasons are to balance familiar and unfamiliar repertory.

“There are some people who have never heard Beethoven’s Fifth before, although for others that’s a tired warhorse,” he said. “We will balance that with new works, like the (Marcel) Dupre G-minor Organ Concerto at the Crystal Cathedral in the spring.”

* Roger Hickman will conduct the Four Seasons Orchestra in music by Liszt and Beethoven on Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Pianist Leonid Kuzmin will be the soloist in Liszt’s “Totentanz” and “Hungarian Fantasia.” Hickman will also conduct Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” and Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3. $15 to $25. (714) 854-4646.