Hoping to Hit More High Notes

Asked to choose a favorite among the opera premieres he has led from the orchestra pit, John DeMain, Opera Pacific’s new music director, pulls a long face.

“Not a fair question,” he says, but rises to the challenge anyway. “I would have to say ‘Nixon in China’ is a phenomenal work. I thought there was so much in that.”

During a recent interview in Opera Pacific’s offices, the maestro ticked off what it was he so admired in the John Adams opera: “The meeting with Chairman Mao, the second act with the aria of Pat Nixon, the Mark Morris ballet, the beautiful quartet in the last act.”

DeMain conducted the 1987 world premiere of “Nixon in China” at the internationally respected Houston Grand Opera, where he spent 18 years--four as principal conductor and 12 as music director--and where he led the orchestra in almost all the new operas premiered there between 1976 and 1994.

Among others were Leonard Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place,” Philip Glass’ “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8,” Carlisle Floyd’s “Willie Stark” and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” Michael Tippett’s “New Year,” as well as the American premieres of Glass’ “Akhnaten” and Astor Piazzola’s “Maria de Buenos Aires.”

No stranger to Opera Pacific, DeMain conducted its maiden production, “Porgy and Bess,” in 1987 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. He’s been back four times since then, leading the orchestra for “Tosca,” “Faust” “Aida” and “Die Fledermaus.”

But in joining Opera Pacific’s general director Patrick L. Veitch, who chose him recently for the new post of music director created after last fall’s departure of the company’s founding general director, David DiChiera, DeMain does not expect to be commissioning new operas.

“The first thing we’re hoping to do is become more adventurous within the standard repertory,” he said. “We’re going to look at composers and major operas that have not been performed yet here.”

Short and compactly built, the Juilliard-trained DeMain, 53, exuded an irrepressible enthusiasm.

“We’re going to see if we can’t get the audience to come along with us and look at some of these masterworks. So we’re going to try to move away from focusing on the top 10 and get into the top 30. That’s already going to take some doing.”

DeMain, who left Houston to pursue a symphonic conducting career--he now leads the Madison Symphony in Wisconsin and is artistic director of the Madison Opera--will conduct “Cosi Fan Tutti” next season for Opera Pacific and three productions in each of the two following seasons through 2000.

His contract also calls for him to spend 10 weeks in the county next season and 22 weeks a year--almost double Opera Pacific’s 10- to 12-week annual performance schedule--beginning with the 1998-99 season.

His symphonic career will continue in Madison, as will his guest appearances as an opera conductor both in the U.S. and abroad.

Recent work has taken him from Tokyo to La Scala in Milan and the Paris Opera. Upcoming engagements include debuts at the Opera Theater of St. Louis and the Queensland Opera in Brisbane, Australia, and returns to the Seattle Opera and the Houston Grand Opera.

“I think the audience here is not unlike the audience in Houston,” he contended. “You have to do what you believe in and bring your audience with you. You have to live sometimes through some pretty scary moments. To think that it was all a bed of roses for the Houston Grand Opera is dreaming.

“Houston had a big commitment to new work. The board figured out that, maybe, while they didn’t like new work, it was what gave the company its identity in the world. So they put up with new work. It wasn’t out of a big conviction that they let it happen.”

DeMain seems to have been to the podium born. He led his school band as a fourth-grader and by 14 was music director of a community orchestra in Youngstown, Ohio, his hometown. He recalls conducting a production of “Brigadoon” in which “everybody on stage was old enough to be my grandparent.”

By the time he got to the Juilliard School in New York, where he studied piano with Adele Marcus and received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance, DeMain was earning enough money conducting professional summer stock from the pit to pay for his tuition. “I loved theater, opera, choral music and playing piano,” he said. “I liked singing a lot. I started playing for every voice teacher around. I was coaching kids for their Broadway auditions. I was teaching piano. That’s how I paid for my living expenses.”

In the summer of 1971, after he’d been an assistant conductor for two years at the National Education Television Opera Project, DeMain was invited to the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts as a conducting fellow. Michael Tilson Thomas, a protege of Leonard Bernstein, was teaching there.

“Lenny came in the middle of the summer,” DeMain remembers. “Like Moses, he did part the Red Sea. I’ll never forget. He arrives and says, ‘I would like to see all the conductors.’

“Tomorrow, right? We had to prepare something overnight. Then he gave us a master class the next day. He was so clairvoyant, it was incredible.

“John Mauceri and I were in the same group. Lenny evaluated what we did. He saw through everybody, like a seer. He knew my whole musical background by the way I conducted, and also what my potential was.”

DeMain’s more significant contact with Bernstein would come later. But does he consider himself a protege?

“You know how singers, if they spend one hour in your presence, it’s all of a sudden on their resume that they studied with you?” he asked.

“Well, several years later, after I got the job at Houston and had a little bit of prominence, I’m reading an article about some of the conductors Lenny taught. I had one three-hour master class with him at Tanglewood, and there I was listed as one of his pupils.”

Tanglewood led to a post as an assistant to Julius Rudel, then the artistic director of the New York City Opera. DeMain stayed a year and was preparing for his New York conducting debut when Dennis Russell Davies offered him a job at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra doing everything from playing chamber music to conducting to having concerts and his own subscription series.

“It was a dream,” DeMain said. “And what a beautiful musical organization. I went to Julius and asked, ‘What do I do?’ He said, ‘I won’t stand in your way. But I’m not giving you your debut next year because I have to redo my whole music staff.’ So I had to give up something.”

DeMain spent two years at St. Paul. During that period he had “a big success,” he said, leading the Pittsburgh Symphony in an exchange concert, and next went to Houston, where he was appointed music director of Texas Opera Theatre, the touring troupe of the Houston Grand Opera.

Perhaps the most significant reason for going to Houston, he said, was that HGO general director David Gockley liked to promote from within. “He quickly let me know that if I came there and did well, there would be a future,” DeMain said.

That future arrived sooner than either of them anticipated. In 1976, during his second year there, DeMain heard that the main company was going to mount “Porgy and Bess.”

“I did the classic thing,” he said. “I ran into David’s office and said, ‘Do you have a conductor?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Then you should hire me. I’m the best damned musical-comedy conductor in the business. But nobody knows it because I didn’t want them to.’

“He said, ‘Do you know jazz?’ I said, ‘That won’t be a problem.’ . . . And he gave me the job.”

That “Porgy and Bess,” conducted in the pit by DeMain and directed on stage by Jack O’Brien (artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre), galvanized audiences and critics. The George and Ira Gershwin work, originally done on Broadway, had never been taken seriously as grand opera until then.

“It was because of our production that the Metropolitan Opera finally did it,” DeMain said. “And since then almost every major opera house in the world has taken it up.”

Gockley promoted DeMain, then 32, from the touring troupe to the main company, making him principal conductor and, two years later, music director of the Houston Grand Opera.

DeMain’s involvement with “Porgy and Bess” became his major calling card. When Bernstein heard him conduct the production in New York, it also cemented relations between them.

“Lenny came backstage,” DeMain recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve waited 32 years to hear this piece done this way. Now I don’t have to do it. You did it.’ ”

Several years later, he got his chance to work with Bernstein in Houston on the 1982 world premiere of Bernstein’s opera, “A Quiet Place.”

“It was a very problematic work,” DeMain said. “The public and the press did not like it. The Houston Symphony down in the pit adored it. The music is powerful. But they had a problem with the subject matter and the density of the subject.

“The problem for me is that it’s a chamber opera with an 80-piece orchestra. When we did it just with the piano in the rehearsal room, people would see it and they would weep. They got it. And when it came out into this huge hall, they would have no experience.

“Lenny would say to me, ‘Why do I like my own piece better in the rehearsal room?’ I said, ‘Lenny, that’s because you didn’t write a ‘Di quella pira,’ “--a reference to the rousing aria from Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” which more or less defines grand opera. “You wrote conversations. You wrote simultaneous little duets. You have to be in a small room for that.

“I’ve often thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to rescore “A Quiet Place” for a 19-piece chamber orchestra and put it in a small room?’ ”

But with Opera Pacific performing in the vast 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall at the center, DeMain doesn’t expect small chamber operas to be on his agenda immediately, any more than world premieres of new works will be.

“A conservative public likes to see what it knows,” he explained. “Hopefully, we can give the county a powerful musical experience in the theater with the great composers.

“There are large Verdi works that haven’t been performed here. There’s Janacek and Britten and Massenet. Those are the composers we’re looking at. There are fabulous pieces by all of them yet to be done.”