Building a Better Fest

“I knew there was something that needed to be done.”

That’s the way Dean Corey explains the genesis of the Eclectic Orange Festival, Southern California’s annual celebration of the new and unusual in the performing arts. The festival, which kicks off its six-week 2001 season Sept. 28, has been credited (by Daily Variety) with transforming Orange County into “a hotbed of arts exploration” in its short three years of existence. On top of that, it has paid its bills and attracted steadily growing audiences in the tens of thousands.

Which only serves to underline the leap Corey was contemplating back in 1993, when he became executive director of the stable, successful but relatively staid Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the primary presenter of touring classical music at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and other venues.

“Our mission was to keep classical music alive and flourishing at a high quality,” Corey said recently. “Having subscription series is the way we’d done it before. But giving concerts strictly on a subscription series gets further and further from the mainstream of life.

“The world has changed so much, there was a real need for something to link us into the future, to carry classical music well beyond all of us.”

Corey knew the problem firsthand. He had come to the society from the financially troubled San Diego Symphony. As director of development there for three years, he had helped reach some important funding goals, but that orchestra’s dark days were hardly over (it would declare bankruptcy in 1996 before coming back to life two years later). He also was familiar with the festival model, especially the Salzburg Festival in Austria and the avant-garde Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.

When he looked for answers to the future of classical music, it led him in that direction.

“It generates a higher energy level than regular concert series,” he said. “At a festival, a virtual community surrounds the events and places them among contemporary life.”

And that, he says, makes all the difference.

Annual performing arts festivals, such as the Salzburg and Edinburgh events, are commonplace in Europe. The United States has its examples as well, among them the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s fall Next Wave Festival, founded in 1983, and the Lincoln Center Festival, which began in the summer of 1996.

Even Los Angeles had its fling. The city mounted an ambitious arts event during the 1984 Olympics. The $11.5-million Olympic Arts Festival, directed by Robert J. Fitzpatrick, offered nearly 424 performances and exhibitions at four dozen sites in 17 days. Some 1,500 artists from 18 countries participated.

The city, and Fitzpatrick, tried to keep the idea and the momentum alive, with hopes for similar events at regular intervals over the next decade. The concept had many successes, such as Peter Brooks’ nine-hour presentation of “The Mahabarata” and Ingmar Bergman’s production of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” but eventually it imploded. The $5.7-million 1987 festival ended with a budget surplus, but the $5.6-million 1990 festival was $500,000 in the red, a debt it took organizers until 1993 to pay off. The $4-million 1993 festival was the last large-scale citywide effort.

Corey knew about the hard facts of L.A.’s experience, but they didn’t so much deter him as provide a blueprint of what not to do. “We’re not blessed with truckloads of cash--as L.A. had. We started relatively small and we try to surpass ourselves each year.”

Actually, the original plan was even more conservative. In 1995, Corey decided that the best way to get a festival for Orange County was to import it, and the one he chose was Next Wave.

“We began very serious talks around 1995 and even invested some money,” he said. “But as years went by, we began to attract [the same artists] they could. The need was unraveling. We found that what we needed to create here was not exactly what they needed in New York. Out here, we’re a much younger community. Culturally, we didn’t know where we are.”

Corey underscored the difference when he named his festival. Other festival took their titles from their locations (Salzburg or Edinburgh) or their festival type (Next Wave). Corey combined the two.

“‘Eclectic Orange’ suggests a very interesting mix of choices that was going to be in Orange County,” Corey said.

Once he had that concept, he went after other arts institutions to join the effort, and not incidentally, to share the costs and risks and help with the goal of building momentum.

“What was true for us, logic would say, would help other organizations too,” he said. “There was some reticence at first. A sense of territory being invaded initially was the feeling at the time. “

The first festival showcased 17 productions and involved partnerships with five arts organizations, including the Irvine Barclay Theatre, Pacific Symphony and Orange County Performing Arts Center. It sold 20,000 tickets.

“We were already thinking of the following year,” Corey said. “The board said, ‘Let’s keep going.”’

As festivals go, Eclectic Orange is still a baby.

This year, it will present 26 classical music, new music, world music, theater and dance events from Sept. 28 through Nov. 11, opening with the Southern California premiere of a Baroque opera, Rameau’s “Platee” as staged by Mark Morris.

The number of performances is up from the original 17 but down from 30 over seven weeks last year. (The administration says 26 events in a six-week period is more “manageable.”)

Compare that to the 90 to 110 opera, dance, music, theater and interdisciplinary events presented each year by the Lincoln Center Festival or the 66 main stage performances in the Brooklyn Academy’s upcoming Next Wave Festival, Oct. 2 through Dec. 20.

Of course, the well-established New Wave Festival receives administrative support from the academy, a $25-million-a-year cultural arts center. The festival’s direct costs run about $4 million annually according to its executive producer, Joseph V. Mellilo.

Among the New Wave’s more than 280 productions since 1983, 81 have been world or U.S. premieres, including numerous commissioned works.

The Lincoln Center Festival operates on a budget that varies from $8.5 million to $11 million. It has presented 75 world or U.S. premieres and has made four commissions.

By comparison, Corey’s budget for 2001 is about $2 million. Box office should bring in about 50% of the budget, with the rest coming from grants and corporate and private support.

Last year, the festival achieved a surplus of $123,000 on a budget of $1.2 million. Since it began, it has presented only a few world or U.S. premieres, but about 40% of its offerings have been Southern California firsts.

“Premieres are not a driving factor,” Corey says. “It’s more important to collaborate then to have something exclusively and have the first performance. The more important thing is to have the work happen.”

“We were co-commissioners for the Glass Symphony No. 5 [last year] with the Salzburg Festival, the Brussels Festival and the Next Wave Festival. We were co-commissioners along with some others on the John Tavener piece [‘The Bridegroom’] last year. But we were able to get the U.S. premiere.”

What is Corey’s budget bringing this year? The festival will present the world premiere of Oscar winner Dun’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” Concerto for Erhu and Chamber Orchestra (Irvine Barclay Theatre, Oct. 19-21); the U.S. premiere of Hal Hartley’s “Soon,” a theater piece based loosely on the 1993 showdown in Waco between the FBI and David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect (Nov. 1-7 in Founders Hall at the Performing Arts Center); and a tribute to blues artist Muddy Waters (Oct. 2 at the Irvine theater).

A new event--a museum show--of Corey’s devising has been added to the mix this year: “You Are Hear: Music Machines at the Museum.”

“A lot of people have an appreciation for contemporary avant-garde visual art,” Corey explained. “But when you go to [what is] analogous in music, they’re horrified by it. I’d ask, ‘How can you look at that and not listen to this?”’

Again, he decided it was a delivery problem.

“The traditional concert format is really a 19th century convention,” he said. “Maybe that’s not the appropriate way to do new music. At a museum’s exhibit, for instance, you can go pretty much any time you want, stay as long as want, look at a few or as many pieces as you like, go back again and see the work again.”

So he decided to “install” music at the Orange County Museum of Art: interactive instrument-sculptures by Trimpin, a Seattle artist, composer and inventor; Ligeti’s “Poeme Symphonique” for 100 metronomes; and Italian pianist Marino Formenti via Yamaha Disklavier Pro 2000. There will also be a video of Karlheinz Stockausen’s “Helicopter Quartet,” in which each member of the Arditti Quartet plays inside a separate flying helicopter.

“People can see it every day or see parts of it or walk out of it,” Corey said. “It becomes appealing and curious in this format.”

And choices are what Corey wants to emphasize.

“In terms of programming, we’re much broader [than other festivals],” Corey said. “We’re truly Californian. We’re truly eclectic. We’re involved in so many disparate activities. You would never have a Muddy Waters tribute at the Salzburg or Next Wave festival. We’re much broader in that sense.”

But has the Eclectic Orange Festival created a safe future for classical music? One way to judge is ticket sales. Where the first Eclectic Orange Festival drew about 20,000 people, the second outing sold 45,000. Ticket sales for the 2001 edition, at press time, stood at about 30,000.

Corey is philosophical about assessing his creation. “The potential is far greater than what we’ve achieved,” he said. “But you can’t measure success by the size of the audience. That’s like measuring the success of spinach. A child might not like spinach, but you have to wait until a child develops to know for sure. That’s much like the new stuff.”

Some observers have noted cynically that the festival might be seen mostly as a clever marketing ploy because the strategy of working with other arts organizations means that many of the events would have been presented anyway. The festival just provides an umbrella and extra advertising.

There’s more to it than that, insists Corey. The festival encourages more adventuresome programs by everyone because “there’s safety in number. You can do controversial work and it’s cushioned by being within a format. A prime example was the Glass Symphony No. 5. The Pacific Symphony wouldn’t have done it on its own. The Pacific Chorale wouldn’t have done it on its own. This allowed a great synergy.”

In general, the critics and other observers agree.

“It’s quite a remarkable endeavor,” said Ernest Fleischmann, former managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and current head of the Ojai Music Festival. “I don’t know many producing entities that put together as intense and varied and sometimes quite daring series of programs in such a short time. It should be an example to [others] to show what can be done.”

Even so, Corey wants to cast a bigger net.

“The next ingredient that is needed--and it takes time to develop--is a theme or idea or philosophy or a thought that can be an organizing point of most of the work of the festival,” Corey said. “That’s what I have in mind for 2002, which we haven’t announced.” * Eclectic Orange Festival, Sept. 28-Nov. 11, at various venues in Orange County. Schedule and ticket prices: (949) 553-2422 or https://www.eclecticorange.org.