Burrell Leaves Opera Pacific

Lori A. Burrell, managing director of Opera Pacific, the county’s only opera company, resigned abruptly on Monday, the company has confirmed. Her departure is the latest in a series of exits at the financially strapped company since Patrick L. Veitch took over as general director in September.

“The reason she gave me is that the role offered her in our restructuring--that of chief financial officer--didn’t suit her career goals,” Veitch said Thursday.

“From the moment I arrived, I began reorganizing [the company] along the line of professional specialists rather than generalists.”

Burrell could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Opera Pacific has been battling a $1.1-million deficit that it revealed a month after Veitch’s appointment. The company’s annual budget is $5.5-million. Since his arrival, Veitch has reduced the deficit to about $650,000.

Part of his belt-tightening included cutting staff and canceling plans for co-producing the U.S. premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The cancellation endangered a $100,000 grant earmarked for that production from the National Endowment for the Arts. The company has resubmitted the application, requesting the funds for a different project.

At the time of his appointment, Veitch called Burrell, who been in a lesser management position with Opera Pacific since its founding in 1986, an important part of his “troika” of managers. The third member was David DiChiera, the company’s founding managing director. DiChiera subsequently left to run Michigan Opera Theatre, which he founded in 1971.

Five full-time staffers were let go or resigned around the same time, and one full-time employee was reportedly reduced to part-time status. Insiders cited personality conflicts with Veitch as contributing to the departures.

Key board members Thomas Hammond and Gloria Gae Gellman resigned in November.

Meanwhile, Veitch has added important players to his team, including John DeMain, renowned former director of the Houston Grand Opera, as the company’s first music director, effective in 1998.

“I didn’t get rid of Lori,” Veitch said. “It was an amicable departure. I am saddened by it. I wish she had taken the position we offered her.”

Burrell had served as director of production and had developed Opera Pacific’s Apprentice Artists Program before being named director for production and financial planning in 1991. Previously, she had been artistic administrator at the Virginia Opera Assn. and administrator of Wolf Trap Opera Company, also in Virginia.

No successor to Burrell has been named. Deborah Dixon, who has worked as an assistant to the chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and as senior vice president of the Pasadena Playhouse, is filling in on an interim basis, Veitch said.