Beethoven Fest Concerts Set for 1999

The Philharmonic Society of Orange County announced Monday it will present a U.S. exclusive series of performances of Beethoven’s nine symphonies with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the London-based Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique in May 1999.

Also as part of a festival celebrating the year 1999, mezzo-soprano superstar Cecilia Bartoli will return to Costa Mesa in April 1999 in a recital of works by Beethoven and other composers. Bartoli made her Southland debut, under the society’s sponsorship, in 1995 to a sold-out Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The “Beethoven: The Age of Revolution and Romance” series will be underwritten by a $250,000 grant from the Leo Freedman Foundation, the largest gift the society has ever received from the foundation. The concerts and Bartoli’s recital will be presented at the center.

The Freedman money will also fund special programs related to the Beethoven concerts for Orange County schoolchildren.

In conjunction with the festivities, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana will host a major exhibition of early musical instruments for six weeks in spring 1999.

Drawn from the America’s Shrine to Music Museum at the University of South Dakota, the largest collection of early instruments in the United States, the exhibit will include instruments by Stradivari and Amati and a six-octave grand piano built in Vienna around 1815.

“As we were lining up organizations for our new season, the stature of them appeared huge, so we went after other things to fit them,” executive director Dean Corey said Tuesday. “The [1999] . . . concept is a way of looking back over what we’ve collected in the 20th century and what we’re going to take with us into the 21st. It’s sort of a Noah’s Ark.”

The society announced the festival Monday at its annual meeting in Newport Beach. The organization reported a $344,987 surplus for the 1995-96 fiscal year, which ended June 30, and projected a $440,200 surplus for 1996-97. (As recently as 1990-91, the society recorded a deficit of $300,000.)

Corey said the money will be rolled back into programming.

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Overall attendance was up, he said, but on average the society-sponsored events left about 30% of the center’s seats vacant.

“We were pleased with the audiences, but the events were not always the type of thing that would sell 3,000 tickets. But Steve Reich’s ‘The Cave’ [at the Irvine Barclay Theatre] sold 74% to 75%, which we were really pleased with. It really gave us, if not a green light, certainly a yellow light for presenting contemporary work.”

Performances by Bartoli, the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire will be part of the 1998-99 season. Other events have yet to be announced. Information: (714) 553-2422.