Music : Ma to Go on Record With Pacific Symphony

Superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma heads the list of soloists scheduled to play with the Pacific Symphony when the orchestra records composer Elliot Goldenthal’s commission commemorating the suffering inflicted by the Vietnam War in April for the Sony Classical label, orchestra officials announced Tuesday.

Soprano Ann Panagulias, baritone Sanford Sylvan, the Pacific Chorale, a children’s chorus and Vietnamese folk artists also will participate in the recording project. Goldenthal’s piece, which has not been finished or titled yet, will be recorded at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, orchestra officials said, right after the first public performances of the piece there on April 26 and 27.

Music director Carl St.Clair will lead the orchestra for the recording, scheduled to be released in October. Ma will not play at the Orange County concerts, although the other soloists will. Pacific Symphony principal cellist Timothy Landauer will take Ma’s part on those occasions.

The orchestra’s one-album deal with Sony, partially underwritten by a $50,000 donation from a Pacific Symphony supporter, represents “quite a significant step toward our goal of national recognition, and in this case, certainly, international recognition because the distribution offered on Sony Classical is extraordinary,” Pacific Symphony executive director Louis G. Spisto said.

Ma has appeared with major orchestras and conductors and has won eight Grammys for his Sony recordings. Panagulias, who sang Gilda in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera in 1993, appeared in Orange County a year earlier with Placido Domingo in a benefit concert for Opera Pacific. Sylvan created the title role in John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” and Chou-En Lai in Adams’ “Nixon in China,” and has sung Figaro and Guglielmo in the Peter Sellars’ productions of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi fan tutte,” respectively.

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The cost of the project will exceed $400,000, to be divided about equally between the orchestra and the recording company, Spisto said. The Pacific will pay for the musicians’ costs, drawing on a $50,000 gift from Mark Chapin Johnson of Tustin Hills, president of the Chapin Medical Co. of Corona; a three-for-one $55,000 matching grant from the California Arts Council and $5,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts Special Project Grant.

The arts council challenge requires the orchestra to raise $165,000 in order to receive the $55,000. “We’ve raised more than half of the project goal already,” Spisto said.

Sony Classical will pay for all of the soloists’ costs, the cost of the chorale, all of the recording costs and the rental of the Performing Arts Center for the recording. “Sony is putting up at least (as much), if not more, support as we are,” Spisto said.

The one-project arrangement with Sony is similar to the deal the Pacific had with Koch International Classics when it issued a disc in August. That was the first recording of the orchestra led by St.Clair and included Corigliano’s Piano Concerto with soloist Alain Lefevre and two pieces by Pacific composer-in-residence Frank Ticheli. Johnson was a major donor for that recording, too, contributing $50,000. It was the first recording by the orchestra since 1986.

Talks with Koch about future recordings are under discussion, “although we haven’t decided the repertoire,” Spisto said.