Opera Pacific Plans a More Daring 1995-96 : Season: Among the offerings are Verdi’s challenging ‘Otello’ and Gluck’s ‘Orfeo,’ directed by the former bad boy of modern dance, Mark Morris.

Departing from the sure-fire box-office repertory of the current season, Opera Pacific will include some adventuresome and risky works in 1995-96.

The company’s 10th anniversary season will consist of four operas--the West Coast premiere of Marc Blizstein’s “Regina” and Verdi’s challenging “Otello,” plus such box-office favorites as Bizet’s “Carmen” and Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.”

Additionally, in co-sponsorship with the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the Irvine based-company will present Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” conducted by Christopher Hogwood and directed by the former bad boy of modern dance, choreographer Mark Morris. “Orfeo” will be offered as a non-subscription event.

The new season will initiate a five-year project devoted to American opera, according to general director David DiChiera.

“With our 10th anniversary, I felt we simply needed to do a season that launched a new initiative, that presented some works we had not done before and which celebrated a decade of presentations in Orange County,” DiChiera said recently.

“I wanted to do something that focuses on both the range of what American opera has been in the last decades of the century and on some new work that reflected new stylistic trends.”

Adapted from Lillian Hellman’s play “The Little Foxes,” Blizstein’s “Regina” was produced on Broadway in 1949. Billed as a West Coast premiere, Opera Pacific’s production will be the first in America based on the recent critical edition prepared by John Mauceri, who will conduct it in Orange County, and Tom Krasker.

The production of “Orfeo,” created by the Boston-based Handel and Haydn Society, will be based on the 1962 Vienna edition and will utilize accompaniment by original instruments. The Costa Mesa stop is part of a seven-city tour that also includes an engagement at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles after the Orange County dates.

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Lowell Liebermann’s new “Dorian Gray” will be staged in the 1996-97 season as the second opera in the company’s American series. It is based on the Oscar Wilde novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Commissioned by L’Opera de Monte Carlo, the opera will receive its premiere in Monaco. The date of the premiere will be announced later this year. A graduate of the Juilliard School in New York, Liebermann is now director of the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. This is Liebermann’s first opera, and the 33-year-old composer wrote his own libretto for it.

A co-production with Opera Pacific, “Dorian Gray” will be presented in Orange County in March, 1997, conducted by Mauceri, directed by John Cox and with a cast to be named. Stephen Brimson-Lewis is the designer.