Playing youth

Published: Monday, September 28, 1998

Monday, September 28, 1998

Playing youth

OPERA: Los Angeles venue attracts younger generation through programs promoting increasingly popular genre

By John Mangum

Daily Bruin Contributor

Opera is hip, more hip than it's been in a long time.

Audiences for opera in the United States are getting younger every year, and Los Angeles leads the trend. Of the country's major opera companies, L.A. Opera, which presents performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, has the youngest audience of all.

"I think it's partly because we are a relatively new company with none of the long-standing traditions that have created the sort of middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged audience that is so much the case in other parts of the country (particularly) New York, Chicago and San Francisco," says Peter Hemmings, L.A. Opera's general director.

"Our audience really does come from all walks of life, all ethnic backgrounds, all ages and all economic backgrounds," Hemmings continues. "We are most anxious to make sure that the opera house - the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion - is not a daunting place, and that people feel they can come without feeling out of place."

L.A. Opera's audiences really do not fit the preconceptions that most people may have, with a large number of students and other young people attending performances regularly.

Brian Raisbeck, a 24-year-old studying music composition at Cal State, Northridge, has seen three L.A. Opera performances. He enjoyed Verdi's "Stiffelio" with Placido Domingo, and Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" in the 1995-1996 season, but his favorite production was Puccini's "Tosca," which the company revived in the fall of 1996.

"I think that the best performance I've seen here was 'Tosca,'" Raisbeck says. "Carol Vaness, who sang the title role, was fantastic, and the sets were very realistic. I had been to Rome and visited all of the places in the opera, and that made the experience more immediate for me."

The first opera Raisbeck experienced in the theater was Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro," which he attended in San Francisco when he was 18. The art form's richness immediately struck him, and he was impressed that there was more to opera than singing.

"I liked the combination of all the different aspects - theater, the sets, singing, music, drama," Raisbeck says. "You can't get that in the theater. That's just spoken drama."

Deals for students make it possible to experience the combination of visual and performance arts that makes opera so unique in new productions and revivals of popular stagings at L.A. Opera. Hemmings hopes that students will take advantage of the company's various offers.

"One of the ways we ensure that young people can get in is by having a student rush, and a seniors' rush as well," Hemmings explains. "People can get in a half-hour before the performance for $20 to any seats that are unsold, and that works very well for slightly less popular operas. It doesn't work so well for popular operas, because they sell out anyhow."

But sometimes there are even a few tickets to these performances, and students often stand in line for several hours to get seats. Jared Poley, a graduate student in history at UCLA, was especially happy with his tickets when he saw Richard Strauss' "Salome" last season.

"The seats were great," Poley remembers. "I got to sit in front of my advisor."

Raisbeck has also had good experiences getting tickets to L.A. Opera performances.

"Actually, the best experience I've ever had with buying student tickets was at San Francisco Opera," Raisbeck says. "The seats were third row center, in the orchestra. But my seats here have been pretty good, too."

In addition to offering student rush tickets, the company takes other steps to build and maintain a young audience. Each season, performers from the opera stage works specifically written to appeal to younger listeners in Los Angeles area schools.

"We have a huge outreach and education effort," Hemmings says. "We spend $1 million a year on outreach and education, partly because Proposition 13 prevents money from being spent on arts education in schools. Rather, we have to do it, if there's to be any (arts education) at all. From a purely selfish view, we're anxious that there should be people in the future who want to come to opera."

So far, the efforts seem to be paying off. Students have already staked out what they want to see from this season's offerings, which include popular favorites like "Don Giovanni" and "Carmen," alongside less familiar works such as Massenet's "Werther" and Verdi's "Falstaff."

"As a student, I think the upcoming season is very well-suited to the student taste, because there's popular things that students have heard of, but haven't necessarily heard in person," Poley says. "On one level, it's a familiar repertoire - things like 'Carmen,' where everyone kind of knows the music. You've heard it, it's a familiar kind of thing, and so it's cool to be able to go and see it performed. But on the other hand, there's also unfamiliar stuff that people might not necessarily have heard before, and so it's a way of exposing a new generation to new operas."

OPERA: For L.A. Opera information, call (213) 972-8001.

GENEVIEVE LIANG/Daily Bruin

On a cool September evening, a young crowd of opera patrons in dressy attire awaits curtain call for the opening night of the romantic opera "Werther" on the steps of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

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