Memorable rise of O.C.’s arts giant

When the Orange County Performing Arts Center opened on Sept. 29, 1986, the festivities began with a congratulatory telegram from President Ronald Raisin -- as its reader, board member Timothy Strader, pronounced the sender’s name before quickly correcting himself.

Then Leontyne Price sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The evening’s headliners, the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta, concluded with Beethoven’s Ninth, supported in joy by the massed voices of the Pacific Chorale and the now-defunct Master Chorale of Orange County.

A quarter-century on, amid the sublimities and the slip-ups, the masterstrokes and the miscalculations, the center -- which this year was renamed the Segerstrom Center for the Arts -- remains unchallenged as the colossus of big-time performing arts in Orange County.

Its annual budgets have grown past $50 million a year, and the center has held true to its founding principle of doing it without taxpayer support.

The center celebrates its anniversary with free programming: Saturday and Sunday performances of an outdoor, interactive kids’ show, “We Built This City,” from Australia’s Polyglot Theatre, and two Sunday concerts -- a 1 p.m. organ recital by Cameron Carpenter and a 5 p.m. outdoor rock show by Ozomatli.

Here are memories, brilliant, disappointing and quirky, that have sprouted these 25 years from a former lima bean field.

A diva’s rocky road to stardom: In 1987, an unknown Renee Fleming sang in an all-Andrew Lloyd Webber program by the Master Chorale, providing, per the Times review, “stratospheric obbligatos on cue” during a medley drawn partly from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and “strong, secure vocalism” during Webber’s “Requiem.” In 1990, the still-unheralded singer was back -- wearing eyeglasses, for some reason -- as Donna Elvira in Opera Pacific’s “Don Giovanni.” The third time was the charm: In 2002, the “gifted and magnetic” soprano was now headlining a recital for Opera Pacific. By 2011, reviewed as “America’s diva,” she had come full circle, jetting in to help celebrate leading donor Henry Segerstrom’s 88th birthday with a concert that included rock songs from her “Dark Hope” album.

Sondheim more boffo than Sir Andrew: “Into the Woods” played to more than 98% of capacity during a weeklong run in 1989, its box-office gross besting by $5,000 a record Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” had set a year earlier. But “Cats” is the most frequent Broadway visitor -- eight engagements. In 1994, Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” set the extended-run attendance record of 149,354 (94% of capacity for 53 shows). “The Lion King” drew 148,081 in 2005.

Who’s got No-Doz? Coffee and cola were banned from the center’s bars and refreshment carts for the first 10 years, for fear of what brown spills might do to the carpeting. A ban on red wine continued for a few additional years.

After the fall: With many refugees of the Vietnam War having settled in Orange County, 1995 saw premieres of two works commemorating the 20th anniversary of Saigon’s fall. The Pacific Symphony commissioned Elliot Goldenthal’s “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio,” then recorded it at the center with the Pacific Chorale and the Ngan-Khoi Vietnamese Children’s Chorus. Yo-Yo Ma did overdubs for the Sony Classical release. A Cal State Fullerton-based training orchestra affiliated with the Pacific Symphony premiered “1975,” a symphonic suite by Khoa Le, who had fled communist forces and settled in Orange County.

The Man in Black does ancient Egypt: In 1988, Johnny Cash strode onto the stage of Segerstrom Hall, where his backdrop was the set for Opera Pacific’s production of “Aida,” then in mid-

run. His greeting to the audience: “As you probably know after three songs, this is not ‘Aida.’ ”

Rock ‘n’ roll is (finally) here to stay: Economics, an overcrowded schedule and lack of interest by the center conspired to drastically limit performers of the rock era during its first 20 years. That changed with the 2006 opening of the new wing, where Sheryl Crow was the first headliner in the 500-seat Samueli Theater. Cash, Ray Charles, k.d. lang and Art Garfunkel and James Taylor as guest soloists with the Pacific Symphony were among the few before her.

Esa-Pekka’s high school days: When Esa-Pekka Salonen made his center debut in 1992, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he was already an O.C. veteran, having led the Phil at Santa Ana High School Auditorium in December 1985.

Overenthusiasm in the appreciation of music is no vice. Early on, some observers scoffed at the inexperienced audiences’ tendency to applaud between symphonic movements. But Keith Clark, the Pacific Symphony’s founding music director until his 1988 ouster, saw no problem. “I’m glad people are clapping in the wrong places because

How big is that birdie in the window? Richard Lippold’s abstract “Fire Bird” passes through the glass facade of Segerstrom Hall. Made of steel and aluminum treated to shine an iridescent red and gold, it’s 60 feet tall and 100 feet long, with a wingspan of 120 feet. Henry Segerstrom’s wife, Renee, named it for a Stravinsky ballet she loved. The arch that’s the hall’s defining architectural gesture is made of red granite from Sweden, the Segerstrom family’s ancestral homeland.

Their finest hour (or three): The Pacific Symphony’s annual American Composers Festival was launched in 2003 under music director Carl St.Clair. The centerpiece was “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” William Bolcom’s sprawling, rarely performed, semi-theatrical setting of William Blake’s classic 1794 book of lyric poems. Many in the audience didn’t last through all three hours, but Times critic Mark Swed raved: “This is music of great import, and ... perhaps the Pacific Symphony’s finest moment.”

Time flies when you’re having fun: Another center marathon was Cecilia Bartoli’s nearly three-hour all-Vivaldi recital in 2001, accompanied by the Milanese early music group Il Giardino Armonico. Swed described it as “an evening of stirring, staggering singing and playing without equal.” The crowd demanded four encores, causing the performers to run out of Vivaldi and throw in an aria by Handel.

He gets around: Placido Domingo may be the only artist who has thrilled audiences not only on both of the center’s big stages, but in its outdoor plaza. With Los Angeles Opera, he starred in Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West” in 1991 and the Spanish zarzuela “El Gato Montes” (The Wildcat), in 1994. In 2006, Domingo was the first soloist in the new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, accompanied by the Pacific Symphony while singing Federico Garcia Lorca poems that Bolcom had set for the occasion. In October 2010, 2,600 fans on the plaza saw him play Pablo Neruda in L.A. Opera’s “Il Postino” -- a performance captured two days earlier at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and screened for free.

A Russian dance superstar who no longer could bring it: Rudolf Nureyev was 50 when he made his center debut in 1988 in a staging of “Cinderella” he’d directed for Paris Opera Ballet. Martin Bernheimer’s verdict in The Times: “Nureyev stalks the boards rather blandly, almost self-effacingly” in a production “sprawling listlessly and witlessly on the cramped but lavish stage.”

A Russian dance superstar who still could bring it: In 1988, OCPAC hosted the premiere of a new production of “Swan Lake” that Mikhail Baryshnikov had created as artistic director of American Ballet Theatre. Bernheimer found it “elaborate, thoughtful, often wonderful.” Baryshnikov was not just behind the scenes but out front dancing in 1990 when he brought the White Oak Project, his modern dance effort, to the center for a program that Bernheimer said was “a happy evening of quirky revelations ... Misha at his most beguiling.”

Homegirl makes good, returns often: Star soprano Deborah Voigt spent her teens in Anaheim. Within two weeks of the center’s opening in 1986, she was a soloist singing Rossini with the Master Chorale; her Costa Mesa operatic debut followed in 1993 in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” Next came Strauss and Verdi with the Pacific Symphony (2000), a recital in 2004, and her 2008 debut in the new concert hall, sharing a cabaret-style bill and duets with Barbara Cook.

Paying it forward: “I am a Berliner,” President John F. Kennedy declared in West Berlin in 1963, when the divided and threatened city was on the front line of the Cold War. “We are all New Yorkers,” Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, business director of the Berlin Philharmonic, told its Costa Mesa audience in October 2001, as America reeled from the Sept. 11 attacks. Then the vaunted orchestra did what it does best: in Swed’s words, “glorious Beethoven and Wagner [that] made an ecstatic, entranced audience grateful Berliners.”

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mike.boehm@latimes.com