A Harmonic Emergence That Still Resonates

Ten years ago this month, the Orange County Performing Arts Center opened to huge fanfare and towering expectations.

Privately funded and operated, the lavish, $73-million, 3,000-seat center sprung up alongside prime donor Henry T. Segerstrom’s South Coast Plaza mall, almost as though it were an adjunct. Offering a mix of imported and home-grown talent, the center--practically by default--quickly became the county’s most powerful symbol of artistic ambition, social prestige, plutocratic largess and dedicated voluntarism.

“I could never have brought a Cecilia Bartoli to the Santa Ana High School auditorium, where we used to present our programs, and the Vienna Philharmonic would never have come,” said Dean Corey, who heads the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, which is bringing the orchestra to the center next season.

“The center has been a major catalyst for the county,” continued Corey, on the phone from the Salzburg Music Festival in Austria, where he was scouting for other internationally renowned artists. “It hasn’t just raised the perception of the arts, it’s helping the county come of age as a community.”

Roughly 1,200 of the center’s supporters are expected to attend a 10th anniversary gala concert and celebration next Sunday. The top ticket price is $500; some tables at the post-concert dinner have sold for $5,000 to $50,000 each, a center spokesman says. The one-night event is expected to net $550,000.

The center not only continues to dwarf all other local arts institutions in size (annual revenue has grown from $13.3 million in 1987 to $21.8 million in 1995) but also is the most prominent regionally.

Giving immediate proof when it opened of its oft-proclaimed mission to become the premier presenter of dance on the West Coast, the center brought in the world’s best ballet companies at enormous expense and, further, established itself as a major Southern California stop for international mega-stars and orchestras in classical music, as well as for touring Broadway shows. Meanwhile, it has provided a local opera company, a local orchestra and two local chorales with a place to perform and develop.

Douglas Rankin, president of the nearby $18-million Irvine Barclay Theatre, which opened five years later and which also presents dance, chamber music and theatrical events, calls the center a “phenomenal” success. “Orange County sort of expects its institutions to arrive on the scene full-blown. The center virtually did that.

“Its product has been good to excellent,” continued Rankin, who is not usually effusive. “It increased the profile and influence of other arts organizations. It educated the audience. It brought in product that would not otherwise be here. And its ability to retain the loyalty of its fund-raisers is stunning.”

Another observer, who occasionally bids for the same mega-stars as the center, also lauds its track record. “They’re such a major organization that I don’t think there’s any competition out there for them,” said Victor Gottesman, president of the 1,800-seat, city-financed Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, about 20 miles away in Los Angeles County.

“I think they have a more critical view of the artistic content of the programming than of the bottom line--although the bottom line is very important to them,” Gottesman said.

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The center’s impact on the artistic community in Orange County has been manifold.

Opera Pacific, for example, would not exist without the center. The company--which stages its productions of works from the standard repertory--started during the center’s maiden season and, of all the local groups, is “the most critically tied to the emergence of the center,” said David DiChiera, Opera Pacific’s general director.

“You can’t have an opera company without an opera house,” he noted recently in a phone interview from Detroit (he also heads the Michigan Opera Theatre). “An orchestra or a chorale has much greater flexibility. They can play almost anywhere if they have the space. For opera you need a highly technical theater facility.”

When Rodney Milnes, music critic of the Times of London, came in 1994 to review an Opera Pacific production of Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” he wrote of the center--which has a monumental facade of pink marble shaped like a modernist Roman arch, a plush interior of curved wood, thick carpets in the foyers and huge banks of mirrored glass: “This is the most exciting new opera house I have encountered in America.”

The center has enabled the locally based Pacific Chorale to launch a choral festival that had been on its agenda for years but had been frustrated by the lack of an appropriate hall. Meanwhile, “artistically our organization has grown tremendously” in 10 years of performing at the center, said Julie Bussell, chorale executive director. “Most notably, the California Arts Council [a state funding agency] has rated us in its highest category for three years running. That hadn’t happened before.”

The chorale will host the national convention for Chorus America, a national service organization, next season at the center. “I know if we didn’t have the center available to us, we would not have been in contention for that,” Bussell said.

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Pacific Symphony, from Santa Ana, has grown faster than any other company using the center, with income rising from $2.5 million to $6.5 million over the past decade. It owes much of this growth to the “climate of excellence” fostered by the center, according to Louis Spisto, the orchestra’s executive director.

Curiosity over the center also was a factor. “The orchestra probably wasn’t ready to go into the center when it opened,” Spisto noted in a recent interview. “But with the first two seasons completely sold out because everybody wanted to see what the center was like, we were a financial success without having the strength of an organization--specifically a board--that really understood how we would provide programs and reach out to the community.”

Even though the center’s novelty wore off in following seasons and the county took an economic beating in the early 1990s, Pacific Symphony managed to come out in the black, built a $3-million endowment and acquired some cash reserves.

But the center’s ascendancy over the resident companies, its dominance of the overall performance schedule and its competing interests as a presenter have remained virtually unchanged during the past decade.

Taken together, the Philharmonic Society, Pacific Symphony, Opera Pacific, the Pacific Chorale and the William Hall Master Chorale produced or presented a total of 82 performances--34% of the center’s entire schedule--in its first season. This past season, they offered 102 performances--also 34% (the schedule grew by 24%, from 242 performance dates to 299). The center’s imported presentations have constituted the overwhelming balance.

It would seem, therefore, that what former Times music critic Martin Bernheimer wrote about the center on its fifth birthday still holds: “This lavish haven of the itinerant muses . . . has evolved as a fancy all-purpose booking house, a massive business institution more concerned with importing a production than creating one.”

But fears that the center would swamp the smaller resident groups and deprive them of fund-raising resources so far have proved wrong. Those concerns reached their height during the economy’s nose dive, when mergers were being discussed by Pacific Symphony and the Philharmonic Society as well as by the two chorales, largely to create administrative and fund-raising efficiencies.

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Despite the troubled economy, each group’s annual budget had soared by 1995, along with its revenue, visibility and respectability. Groups not only scotched the merger talk, they now see themselves as more mature institutions with the prospect of greater growth--provided the center proceeds with a proposal to build a second hall within the next decade.

Meanwhile, the center’s contention from the beginning--that it would be a boon to the arts community and the county at large because “a rising tide raises all boats”--has been borne out.

“We saw an explosion in the arts-consuming public,” said Pacific Symphony’s Spisto. “The center drew attention to the arts in the county as an option for leisure-time activities in a way that didn’t exist before.

“My belief is that a market was created around the center that, to this day, is one of its great achievements.”

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TODAY:

In the A section:

* Looking Back: How the center changed Orange County and the local arts scene.

* Who Uses It?: Profiles of five families and the role the center plays in their lives.

* History: A center timeline.

In Business:

* Added Attractions: How nonprofit arts organizations bolster business opportunities.

MONDAY:

In the A section:

* Looking Ahead: Expansion, programming and other plans for the decade.

* Presidential Plans: Who will replace Tom Tomlinson?

* Public Debate: Ours is the only fully privately funded performing arts center in the country. So what?

* The Money Game: Raising funds in O.C. isn’t quite like raising funds anywhere else.

* Q&A;: A talk with the center’s founding chairman, Henry T. Segerstrom.

* A Users’ Guide: The best parking places, the best seats in the house, the restroom with the shortest lines--everything a center-goer needs to know.

In Calendar:

* Critical Analysis: Just how good is the Performing Arts Center? Times reviewer Chris Pasles tells you what he thinks.

* How Others See the Center: The facility as gauged by arts officials across the country.

* One Woman’s Stories: Connie Arrigo, who’s been backstage gatekeeper since the center opened, has seen it all.

* Backstage: What goes on behind the scenes.

* Stage Notes: Memorable moments recalled by performers.

In Life & Style:

* High Society: When the center was born, the local social scene came of age.

THURSDAY:

In OC Live!:

* Gala Overview: What center party-goers can expect Sunday.

SUNDAY:

In Calendar:

* Gala Premiere: A preview of composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s center-commissioned anniversary piece.