Chamber Orchestra Finds Niche in Valley After All

After getting off to a shaky start, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will conclude its first San Fernando Valley concert tour on an upbeat note tonight with plans already in place for a second season.

The return of the first major Los Angeles-area musical group to test the Valley market was hardly a certainty after the prestigious orchestra performed its first two Valley concerts in front of largely unpaid audiences in high school auditoriums.

In its final concert tonight, the Pasadena-based orchestra will bring Conductor Frans Brueggen, considered a leading interpreter of early classical music, to the podium of a Van Nuys church.

A leader of the Pasadena-based orchestra said it has been encouraged by the discovery of a high-quality performance hall in the 1,800-seat sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Van Nuys.

“We are very excited” to find a Valley home, said the orchestra’s executive director, Deborah Rutter. Discussions are already in progress to hold all of next season’s concerts there, she said.

Announcement of the chamber’s return for a second season also brought predictable cheers from a leading Valley arts proponent.

“I think it’s magnificent,” said Christine Glazier, executive director of the San Fernando Valley Arts Council. “To have a top-quality, already proven orchestra that’s known worldwide is outstanding. It really shows the Valley people are looking for this kind of entertainment.”

Rutter said the arrangement with the church, whose elegant sanctuary has seldom been used for non-church productions, helped the orchestra rebound from a disastrous Valley debut.

The orchestra, which draws large crowds to several auditoriums in the Los Angeles area, sold fewer than 100 tickets for its November concert in the Van Nuys High School auditorium, Rutter said. Promoters gave away many tickets to fill seats.

A December concert at Reseda High School fared no better.

Rutter said the nonprofit orchestra’s board of directors then decided to drop its Valley promoter, Excalibur Productions, a private business that was also attempting to convert a former Woodland Hills movie theater into a 900-seat performance hall called the Excalibur Theatre.

Original Plan

Under the original agreement, the Excalibur, scheduled to be opened late last year, would have become the orchestra’s Valley home.

But the theater has still not been completed and Excalibur was unable to pay the orchestra for its December concert, Rutter said. Representatives of Excalibur Productions could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

After its breakup with Excalibur, the orchestra postponed its January concert and began searching for a new location, Rutter said. The search ended when the orchestra received an invitation to use the First Baptist Church at 14800 Sherman Way.

Stephen Amerson, a minister who serves as the church’s musical director, said he hopes to establish a long-term relationship with the orchestra.

“We’re really glad to have them here,” Amerson said. “I hope we can become their home in the Valley.”

Rutter said the new hall provides better seating and acoustics than the high school auditoriums.

Numbered Seats

“We were able to number the seats,” she said. “We felt it was a much more professional way of presenting it.”

Rescheduling its third concert to March at the church, the orchestra sold 600 tickets, Rutter said.

Though not a triumph for an orchestra that routinely sells out its home concerts at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium, the turnout was encouraging enough to launch a second season, Rutter said.

“It just takes time to develop it,” she said.

In tonight’s 8:30 concert, for which tickets are being sold for $14, $11.50 and $9.50, Brueggen will both conduct and play the recorder solo in J.S. Bach’s Concerto in D Major for recorder.