MUSIC MAVERICK

There are plenty of things about Dean Corey that wouldn’t surprise you. The head of an organization such as the Philharmonic Society of Orange County is supposed to be erudite, energetic, creative and, above all, sophisticated.

Corey is all of those things.

How else would he be able to persuade the mighty Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, singers Cecilia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel, conductors Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado, composer Tan Dun and choreographer Mark Morris to include unassuming little Costa Mesa on their tour itineraries?

What sets Corey apart from the garden-variety arts administrator is that he’s equally comfortable chatting about the instrumental wizardry of Isaac Stern or Jimi Hendrix, analyzing the dramatic subtext of the New Testament or the Harry Potter books, or hobnobbing with Abbado or The Lady Chablis, the real-life transvestite hero/heroine of John Berendt’s bestseller, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” He’s not above the occasional bad pun--he named his beloved black Labrador Luc de Chateau Lafeet and calls him a “juvenile doglinquent.” And few who travel in his circles can pull off the rock ‘n’ roll attitude Corey exhibits when sizing up fast-rising musician Andreas Staier as a “kick-ass harpsichordist.”

The straight-talking Texan, who came to the Philharmonic Society in 1993 after three years as director of development for the San Diego Symphony, has been steadfastly, and not so quietly, helping to redefine what “culture” means in Orange County. At the same time, he’s working to reshape attitudes outside the county about the validity of what goes on behind the Orange Curtain, and he’s transformed the Philharmonic Society, which was a respected but staid group when he came aboard, into a forward-thinking arts organization. In the four years since the 48-year-old society launched its annual six-week Eclectic Orange Festival, Corey has brought numerous works more typical of the Brooklyn Academy or Lincoln Center to the community best known to the outside world as the home of Disneyland and the South Coast Plaza shopping center. The eclectic programming reflects Corey’s sense of adventure. Some examples:

--The world premiere of Dun’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” concerto.

--A tribute to blues great Muddy Waters.

--The Southern California premiere of Morris’ staging of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Platee”; in Corey’s words, “an opera about a frog.”

--The West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 5, a work co-commissioned with Brooklyn’s Next Wave Festival, the Salzburg Festival and the Flanders Festival in Brussels.

--One highlight of Eclectic Orange Festival 2002--which runs Oct. 11 through Nov. 10--will be the first West Coast performances of “La Pasion Segun San Marcos,” a treatment of the gospel of St. Mark using idiomatic Brazilian music by Argentine-born, Boston-based composer Osvaldo Golijov.

Neither hipness nor money alone are enough to lure the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, which have made exclusive West Coast visits to Costa Mesa in recent years and are expected to return. The Vienna Phil’s concerts for the Philharmonic Society have been its only West Coast appearances since 1987.

“This is a group of people who are dedicated to music,” says Clemens Hellsberg, president of the Vienna Philharmonic. “That usually starts with one certain person, and here it is Dean. He is like a shepherd out of the Bible.

“Not that the people he leads are sheep,” Hellsberg adds with a smile. “They are real music lovers, and they trust him.”

Some subscribers have groused about part of what Corey brings them, although most have hung in. “I like it when our die-hard subscribers go, ‘I wasn’t sure about that, but I really liked it,’ ” Corey says. “I love to open their world up a little bit.” Attendance for Eclectic Orange has been rising since it began, and is expected to jump markedly for this year’s festival because of heavy advance sales on the centerpiece event, the U.S. premiere of the Paris-based equestrian troupe Theatre Zingaro’s “Triptyk.”

Corey is open to trying just about anything--from that opera about a frog to punk rock. Eclectic Orange Festival-goers spent an evening in 1999 and again in 2000 at Linda’s Doll Hut, a 100-year-old roadside bar in Anaheim that has been home to hundreds of roots-rock, punk, alternative, country and rockabilly bands over the years. “That was great,” Corey says, laughing at the memory of luring high-society types into a bona fide dive bar. “It was a good group--a real mixture of people who hang around the place and never leave, and our subscribers, who never would have gone there if they hadn’t been with our group.”

Corey isn’t about to suggest he’s leading ignorant masses out of cultural darkness. Rather, he’s responding to organic changes that have taken place as the county has evolved from a region of political and cultural conservatism. With its multiplicity of ethnic, political, religious and economic subpopulations, the county now transcends pigeonholing.

“There obviously needed to be some changes because audiences were changing,” Corey says.

Historically, loyal classical music lovers in most major metropolitan areas have signed up for a full season of performances by various orchestras, soloists and ensembles. They assiduously renewed those subscriptions, then passed them on to their children, who continued the tradition. In recent decades, however, that tradition has withered as technology has provided myriad new ways for people to spend their time and money.

One of Corey’s first experiments was booking the youth-friendly Kronos Quartet, a group with one foot in the classical world, the other in pop.

But his biggest revelation came from, of all places, Trader Joe’s, a favorite haunt for him and his wife, Kaly. Other people walk into Trader Joe’s and see bargains on wine, chocolate-covered almonds and biodegradable detergent. Corey saw The Future of Classical Music. “Theoretically they don’t have to carry a damned thing consistently,” he says. “The point is, they’re out there finding interesting stuff, getting a good deal on it and passing it on.

“That’s kind of what we do.”

Eclecticism came early to Corey, who grew up in Arlington, Texas. His late father, a music teacher, represented the traditional side of classical music. Yet he exposed his son not only to Beethoven and Bach but to Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, whose music some audiences still struggle to understand half a century later. Corey has done his best to pass that sense of cultural adventure on to his children from his first marriage. His daughter, Courtney, is an actress who was in the cast of a nationally touring production of “Rent” earlier this year, while his son, Adam, works for ABC News in New York.

As a teen in the early ‘60s, Corey focused on learning to play the French horn. Yet he was cognizant of what the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and other rock musicians were doing to expand the vistas of pop music.

His sin fronteras (without borders) attitude was honed as he majored in music at the University of North Texas, and further refined through postgraduate work at Yale University in the early ‘70s.

Corey tells of a pivotal experience during his first stint as an arts administrator at the Ft. Worth Symphony in the late ‘70s. He was trying to land a $10,000 contract for a performance. Corey sweated as the man looked over Corey’s contract proposal, then looked up and drawled, “Aww, hell, Dean, let’s do it!”

What has stuck with him is an impatience with anyone who bemoans the loss of musical traditions.

“Music has changed, and it’s not going to go back,” he says. “People have asked, ‘Why do you do all these wacky things? How come you put on an opera about a frog?’ In this day and age, there is a conservatism--and not just in Orange County--a type of conservatism, almost regression, going on in this country. There seems to be even less of a spirit of derring-do.”

Corey wants none of it. His motto would be, “Aww, hell, let’s do it.”