Flaunting O.C.’s Refined Side

Larry McGee has had plenty of time to size up the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. For the last year and a half, he’s been part of the security crew watching over the $200-million, glass-faced addition to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“It’s a work of art,” McGee said Wednesday, standing outside a security fence near the wave-like, undulating structure during his lunch break. He’s pretty certain his ears will agree with his eyes when the Pacific Symphony gives a shakedown concert Aug. 27 for people involved in building its new home.

The 2,000-seat concert hall, designed by Cesar Pelli, has its public debut Sept. 15. Now the center is giving tours to reporters from other regions and nations who cover architecture, music and tourism so they can become acquainted not only with the venue, but also with Costa Mesa as a somewhat unlikely arts hub.

“In Europe we have misconceptions about California. We think about ‘Baywatch’ and ‘The O.C.,’ ” Paolo Magagnoli, a producer for CNBC-Italy, told Henry Segerstrom, the center’s lead donor, during a lunch for a group of visiting media.

Over lunch, Segerstrom talked of breaking through that stereotype. He said the expanded center -- which includes the 1986-vintage, 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall -- may compete to an extent with L.A.’s Music Center and its newest jewel, Disney Hall, but in the long run, “I think we’ll learn to complement each other and expand the market for everybody.”

Like Eli Broad, L.A.’s top arts philanthropist, Segerstrom has picked up on the mantra of “cultural tourism” -- the idea of using high-profile arts attractions to lure visitors and boost the economy.

The center has its own hefty economic challenge: a seven-year campaign has raised $133 million for the hall, leaving it about $70 million short. Center spokesman Todd Bentjen said an additional, unspecified “major gift” had been recently finalized, but the center was awaiting the donor’s OK to announce it.

During its tour, the media contingent was shown such highlights as the expanse of clear exterior glass that’s 300 feet long and 90 feet high and set into a cream-colored facade of Portuguese limestone. Carved into the facade, in big letters, is the venue’s name; those indentations will be filled with what Pelli associate Mitchell A. Hirsch described as “jewel-like” stainless-steel lettering that will jut from the building.

In the circular lobby, a tower of scaffolding stands where a spiral staircase will take shape and the floor of white Spanish marble has yet to be laid. Inside the hall, the most striking feature is a huge canopy of steel and gypsum-reinforced concrete that looms above the stage and can be raised or lowered on steel wires to adjust how sound is dispersed, depending on the scale and style of music being played. The 30 curved canopy components designed by acoustician Russell Johnson resemble huge, white fettuccine noodles flying toward the audience; by opening night they’ll have received a silvery finish.

Concertgoers in the orchestra and four tiers of balconies will be walled in by blond maple wood, with doors that open to reveal side passageways painted a striking deep blue.

No ordinary hallways, they are “reverberation chambers” that, after audiences have passed through them to get to their seats, can be adjusted to regulate the sound via the opening or closing of theater doors.

Judith O’Dea Morr, the center’s executive vice president and chief programmer, recalled after the tour that when the center opened, there were doubts that a place such as Costa Mesa could harbor an A-list operation.

They ended, she said, after New York City Ballet played a weeklong stand during the first season.

Twenty years on, the acid test may come from Placido Domingo, who’ll sing with the Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale on opening night, and the Mariinsky (formerly Kirov) opera, ballet and orchestra, which arrives for a 2 1/2 -week festival in October that includes all four operas of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle.