Society to Launch ‘Eclectic Orange Festival’

For most of its 45-year history, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County has been a concert presenter, bringing many of the world’s great orchestras here.

Now, on the cusp of the millennium, the society is adding something new: producing programs from scratch. The new direction should benefit Orange County audiences in highly imaginative ways.

“When you present programs, you’re looking for things to do,� executive director Dean Corey said in a recent phone interview. “The next step is imagining things to do--which leads to asking, ‘Why don’t we produce something ourselves which can be cutting edge and which puts us more in a leadership position?’ �

The society created its “Eclectic Orange Festival� format to do just that.

The inaugural installment, which includes more than 20 concerts in four venues, opens Oct. 2 and runs through November. The series is projected to be offered each fall.

Programs will range from a newly created multimedia presentation of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex�--incorporating the tape of a famous lecture about the piece by Leonard Bernstein--at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (Oct. 29 and 30), to an “American Roadhouse� concert at Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim (Oct. 9).

Both are major departures for the organization. The idea of the Stravinsky-Bernstein program came to Corey three years ago while viewing a video of the 1973 lecture Bernstein gave at Harvard.

“I thought, if we could modernize this somehow, we could make an audience enjoy it more,� Corey said. “The traditional concert format doesn’t necessarily work as well for today’s newer audiences, which don’t have quite the background which our parents or grandparents did.

“They have so much more to keep track of today,� he said. “So you have to predigest things for them so they can understand and focus on it.�

Corey went to work on the tape using a computer software program that allowed sophisticated editing. He cut the speech down and added multiple images and supertitles. (Corey directed the editing process, though he didn’t actually operate the editing machine.)

“Supertitles can be a double-edged sword,� he said. “The big issue with them is that they’re sort of apart from what’s going on. They come on and come off. They never seem to have any artistic sense of their own.

“But these move around, fade in and out, crescendo. They will help the audience experience the emotions of the music. The audience will have a greater understanding of this piece than ever before just in hearing it,� he said. “No one has ever grasped this piece in this way.�

Presenting a concert at Linda’s Doll Hut, a 90-year-old bar that for the last 10 years has been a spawning ground for local roots rock, alternative and blues bands, is an even more radical departure for the Philharmonic Society.

“It’s not a venue that is typical for us,� Corey said. “But it’s a piece of California history, and it adds an element to this idea of being an eclectic festival.

“There will be several groups performing that night--blues and rockabilly. This is a real roadhouse and a chance to experience what that’s like firsthand,� he said. “This is nothing adapted or brought to a stage. It’s the real thing.�

Corey hopes some of the regular Doll Hut audience that figures to be on hand that night will cross over to the orchestral concerts the society more typically presents, and which still constitute the bulk of its offerings.

“People now have a very eclectic taste,� he said. “There is no such thing as a ‘normal’ subscriber any more. We live in an eclectic world today, and we have to put classical music into this eclectic world so it can survive.�

The common theme to the festival, he said, is “the play between words and music.�

Other examples include a new work by San Francisco composer Jack Heggie, “Anna Madrigal Remembers,� based on Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City� series (Oct. 2); Mikel Rouse’s musical theater piece “Dennis Cleveland� (Nov. 2-6); and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,� based on John Berendt’s book and using Johnny Mercer’s music (Nov. 10).

“This festival will initiate a steady stream of creative projects,� Corey said. “There may also be opportunities for some of these programs to play other places. It may be time for us to be sending things out ourselves.

“One of our goals is for us not to be a whistle stop on a tour--but the reason for the tour,� he said. “All of this will benefit the people of Orange County by letting them have the most interesting first shot at stuff of anybody.�

He hopes the “Oedipus Rex� project will prove especially captivating.

“This will not be an event where the audience is ignored, where they sit there in respectful silence and think, ‘I don’t understand it,’ � he said. “I want a lot of involvement. It’s theirs. It will not be a mystery to them. We want them to be highly affected by it.

“All the arts groups talk about doing more adult education,� Corey added. “This is what this is about, but doing it in a fresher format than that of a preconcert talk. [We’re incorporating] it into the concert so it becomes theater and part of the whole evening.

“I’ve always had a desire to get more people to have the passionate feeling for the music that I do,� he said. “If it takes a certain extra effort to make that happen, so be it.�

* The Philharmonic Society’s “Eclectic Orange Festival� opens Oct. 2 with a concert by the San Francisco-based male a cappella ensemble Chanticleer and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive.