Opera Pacific Manager Leaves Company

IRVINE — After a tumultuous 15 months, Opera Pacific general director Patrick L. Veitch said Wednesday that he has left Orange County’s only professional opera company.

“At this point, I don’t have anything to say, other than verifying that I’m not there,” Veitch said Wednesday from his home near Newport Beach.

His one-year contract had expired in August, but Veitch said in an interview earlier this fall that he expected it to be renewed by the opera’s board of directors without dissent.

Board chairman Patrick T. Seaver declined to explain the abrupt departure. “The whole parting thing is an internal matter to the company,” he said.

Seaver said a search committee will be formed this week to find a successor. In the interim, the company will be run by current managers.

The 10-year-old company was in fiscal trouble when Veitch arrived, and it still is. A month after his appointment in September 1996, Opera Pacific revealed it had recently accumulated a $1.1-million deficit. The company’s annual budget is $5.5 million.

Veitch, formerly of the New York Metropolitan Opera, initiated a number of unpopular belt-tightening moves, including cutting staff, restructuring the board and the management team, and canceling plans for co-producing a U.S. premiere of an opera by American composer Lowell Liebermann.

In September, he announced that the company had closed its fiscal year with a modest $11,526 profit, an encouraging sign given the $951,363 loss recorded the previous year. He also managed to whittle the deficit, but a $653,576 shortfall still loomed.

Personnel upheaval has also plagued the company. At least five full-time staffers resigned or were dismissed around the time of Veitch’s appointment. In addition, two key executive committee members stepped down two months after he arrived.

Another major administrator in the organization, managing director Lori A. Burrill, who had been with the company since its inception, left suddenly this summer. She and other former staffers and board members declined to speak publicly about their resignations, but insiders cited personality conflicts with Veitch as contributing factors.

Amid the turmoil, the company made one significant hire: John DeMain, renowned former director of the Houston Grand Opera, who in March was named as the company’s first music director, effective in 1998.

Opera Pacific presents four operas at the center. Its season opened last month with Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado.” It continues with Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Jan. 6-11.