Opera Pacific : Amplified ‘Aida’ Hits Wrong Note

Opera Pacific’s controversial use of electronic amplification has cost the Costa Mesa-based production company more than $19,000 in grant money from the California Arts Council.

The funds may be restored when the council holds its December meeting at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, a staff member said, after an appeal by Opera Pacific. “There’s a high likelihood that some misunderstanding occurred” over the extent of the amplification, said Elliot Klein, the council’s music administrator for major organizations. “Honest mistakes and misunderstandings do occur.”

Still, the dispute is not settled-- and may not be, even after the council’s Dec. 14 meeting. The use of amplification provokes strong feelings, and both sides maintain that they are certain about what they heard at the performances in question.

Furthermore, even if Opera Pacific’s appeal is successful, there may not be money in the council budget to restore the funding.

At its annual evaluation of musical organizations in May in Sacramento, a council advisory panel recommended granting $32,000 to Opera Pacific for the 1988-89 season--about 26% of the $125,000 the group had requested. In its finding, the panel said it was “distressed to learn that amplification was used in performances of ‘Aida”’ at the Center in January of 1988.

Klein said the finding was based on a conversation between a male panelist, whom he declined to identify further, and Opera Pacific director David DiChiera, indicating that amplification of voices had taken place.

At the May meeting, Elizabeth Appling, founder and musical director of San Francisco Girls’ Chorus and a member of the panel, said it was “dishonest” to amplify voices. “I think it’s an artistic crime,” she said. “From an artistic point of view, for an opera company on this level, it is doing a great disservice to the entire music community to be miking the voices. That’s what separates opera from everything else. You have an instrument that doesn’t need amplification.”

Another panel member, San Diego Opera director Ian Campbell, added: “Get voices that can do it, or don’t do it.”

Opera Pacific and Center officials have acknowledged using vocal amplification at performances of “West Side Story,” “Porgy,” “Die Fledermaus” and “La Boheme.” Still, in its funding application to the council, Opera Pacific denied using it for “Aida.”

No effort was made to reconcile the discrepancy over “Aida” at the meeting.

“Some doubts were raised, but we left it with the authority of our panelists,” Klein said. “I told the panel that through my discussions, to the contrary, I had heard otherwise. The panelist seemed rather convinced from his own conversations that amplification had been used.”

Klein said that, as a result, Opera Pacific received a lower score from the panel than it would have if there had been no vocal amplification. Under the formula used by the panel, a higher rating by a single panel member would have resulted in a total grant of more than $51,000.

After learning its score, Opera Pacific filed a written appeal of the panel’s finding, stating that “despite repeated assurances by Opera Pacific to the contrary, a music panelist stated to panel members that our company’s production of ‘Aida’ was electronically amplified.”

In an accompanying letter from DiChiera and Mrs. Edward W. Schumacher, chairman of the board of directors, the charge of amplification was called “unequivocally and demonstrably false.”

Attached was a second letter, from Philip A. Mosbo, director of theater operations for the Center, which said that with two exceptions, there had been no amplification of ‘Aida.’ The two exceptions were the amplification of a harp solo played backstage, rather than in the orchestra pit, “for a single effect,” and “the monitoring of the orchestra to the stage so that the singers could adequately hear their accompaniment.”

However, Times music critic Martin Bernheimer, who attended two performances of “Aida,” said he was told by a Center official that the microphones used in “monitoring” the orchestra may inadvertently have picked up and amplified the voices of the singers.

Opera Pacific officials, asked about amplification during intermission, “swore with wide-eyed, passionate urgency, up and down on a stack of scores and on their collective mothers’ sacred memory, that the sound was pure, unadulterated, natural,” Bernheimer wrote in his review. “Singers whose vocal output seems modest in other houses boomed and bellowed here with staggering, echo-ridden resonance.”

However, Klein said that based on the Mosbo letter and his own investigation, he was prepared to recommend that the council’s senior staff support Opera Pacific’s appeal when the council meets at the Center Dec. 14, although he said he was not certain that additional funds would be available if the appeal is sustained. Since there have been no successful appeals by major organizations such as Opera Pacific, Klein said, there is no budget allocation to reinstate the grants.

Martin Weil, Opera Pacific’s managing director, said the matter was “just procedural” and declined comment.