Playing youth

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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