Pacific Sees Pianos as Key to O.C. Summer

“This summer, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra will finally flip its lid.”

So say the brochures. They’re referring to the piano lid, of course, and with pianists serving as soloists for every one of the orchestra’s five summer concerts at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, who can argue?

Music director Carl St.Clair divulged how his organization goes about building such a season, which opens Saturday with a pops-oriented “Stars & Stripes on Broadway” program.

“We basically begin with the beginning and the end,” explained St.Clair, reached between rehearsals at the Round Top Music Festival in Round Top, Tex. “It begins with the July 4 concert on July 1 . . . and it ends with the ‘Tchaikovsky Spectacular.’ We know we’ll have ‘Mozart in the Meadows’ in the summer; that’s always a popular seller. . . .”

As for the preponderance of pianists, St.Clair said, “it just sort of ended up that way. When it got to [a certain] point, it was a matter of ‘Let’s follow through . . . let’s do the whole theme.’ ”

“Mozart in the Meadows” is indeed a popular seller. Last summer, when attendance lagged at most of the concerts (single ticket sales were off 3,200 for the season), the Mozart concert was up. Meanwhile, the “Tchaikovsky Spectacular,” which one might imagine to have plenty of popular appeal, was down.

And the Fourth of July concert, according to Pacific Symphony reports, was way down.

“The July 4 concert was on a Monday night,” the orchestra’s executive director Louis Spisto noted. “You’ll notice that this year it’s on a Saturday night. Last year, people were going into work on Tuesday. That made a big difference for us.”

That one concert, in fact, accounted for more than half of the series’ single-ticket losses. Still, given that ticket sales for the five-concert season topped $700,000, a loss of $4,290 may not seem that much.

Certainly not to St.Clair: “I wasn’t aware that it was down,” he said. “I know that subscriptions for this summer are up.”

Subscriptions were up last summer as well.

Said Spisto: “This is our seventh season at Irvine Meadows. As we continue to develop a history there, some seasons will be up slightly, some will be down, particularly when we’re so dependent on single tickets as we are for the July 4th and Tchaikovsky fireworks shows. It can be the day of the week, it might reflect the economy, we don’t know.”

Some of the fireworks are sure to be at the keyboard. The lineup:

* July 1: Pacific Symphony assistant conductor Edward Cumming leads American works including Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with pianist John Novacek and Leonard Bernstein’s ballet suite “Fancy Free”; selections from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” with singer Dale Kristien (of “Phantom of the Opera” fame), and Sousa marches with fireworks.

* July 22: St.Clair conducts Sibelius’ “Finlandia”; Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor with soloist Edith Chen, co-winner of the inaugural Ivo Pogorelich Competition two years ago, and excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

* Aug. 5: “Mozart in the Meadows” features Symphonies No. 34 and 35 and Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, with soloist Stephen Prutsman, a top medalist at the 1990 Tchaikovsky and 1991 Queen Elisabeth competitions; St.Clair conducts.

* Aug. 26: Christopher Taylor, bronze medalist at the 1993 Van Cliburn Competition, is soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4; Gisele Ben-Dor also conducts suites from Falla’s “Three-Cornered Hat” and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”

* Sept. 9: “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” includes Piano Concerto No. 1 with 1991 Queen Elisabeth silver medalist Brian Ganz; “Swan Lake” pas de deux with American Ballet Theatre principal dancers Susan Jaffe and Robert Hill, and the “1812 Overture” with cannons and fireworks; Jack Everly conducts.

St.Clair also noted the season’s dance elements, from “Fancy Free” to “Swan Lake.”

“Pianists and great ballet music--[both] wonderfully entertaining, and a nice introduction into the classical world for people who are not sure they want to digest the more hard core,” he said.

When it comes to assisting audiences to digest the hard core, St.Clair has found that elucidating about the music with preconcert comments, musicological and anecdotal, “really helps. Some people may not like [the talking], but when orchestral musicians don’t know [these things], I can’t expect audiences to know [them].”

Whether St.Clair’s impromptu talks, which will be institutionalized in a new three-concert series at the Orange County Performing Arts Center this fall, will have a place at the summer concerts remains to be seen. But they are, in any case, just one way St.Clair is trying to reach local listeners.

“We’re constantly . . . trying to create ways to develop new audiences, and more educated and more entertained audiences, [audiences that are] feeling more a part of the process, more ownership [of] the symphony, claiming the orchestra,” St.Clair said.

“Through Irvine Meadows, the Casual Classics series, children’s concerts, pops concerts, the Institute Orchestra [and other avenues], we are trying to draw closer, [to develop] kinship with the people, to steep ourselves deep in the fabric.”

* Edward Cumming conducts the Pacific Symphony in works by Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein and Sousa (with fireworks) Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. Pianist John Novacek and vocalists Dale Kristien and Byron Nease are soloists. 8 p.m. Gates open for picnicking at 6 p.m. $13 to $49. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).