A FOND FAREWELL L.A. OPERA'S HEMMINGS TO BE FETED AT CONCERT.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

Among the many operatic luminaries who keep watch over Peter Hemmings' office at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, there's one prominent photo of a bespectacled, middle-age man sticking his tongue out behind Hemmings' back.

Hemmings is laughing in the picture, probably because he's well aware of what mischief his friend David Hockney - artist, fellow Englishman and sometime opera designer - is up to. Having spent 43 years running orchestras and opera companies on three continents, including the past 16 years with Los Angeles Opera, Hemmings seems to have acquired a sixth sense of knowing when something big is sneaking up on him: a promising young tenor, an about-to-be-hot director like Julie Taymor or a business opportunity that may not come round again.

That instinct has well served the founding general director of Los Angeles Opera (formerly L.A. Opera), who will retire next month and return with his wife, Jane, to England, where four of the couple's five children live.

``I think I'm ready to retire,'' Hemmings, who turns 66 this year, says over a midafternoon cup of coffee at his downtown office. ``My wife and I have been traveling the world - we've been married for 38 years - and we want to get back and be near our children and grandchildren.''

Before leaving L.A., Hemmings will spend the next several weeks being made much of. On Monday night, he'll be honored with a celebratory concert and black-tie evening gala with a top ticket price of $2,500 at which singers Placido Domingo, Jennifer Larmore, Carol Vaness, Rodney Gilfry and others will perform. Actor Michael York will emcee the event at the Dorothy Chandler.

Although the spotlight that night will be squarely on Hemmings, Domingo also will command much attention. In July, the superstar Spanish tenor, who currently serves as Los Angeles Opera's principal guest conductor and artistic adviser, will assume Hemmings' creative duties when he takes over as the company's artistic director.

Hemmings won't exactly be spending his golden years puttering about in the garden - though he admits he'll miss tending the orchids at his Pasadena home. Recently appointed to the board of directors of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Britain's premier opera venue, Hemmings has been asked to serve as a ``talent scout'' in Europe. He also will continue pursuing the idea of creating a small opera house in the English Midlands, near Birmingham, ''which is a scheme I've worked on for many years.''

Meanwhile, Hemmings' old job will be split in half. Domingo, 59, will add his L.A. artistic directorship to the similar post he holds with Washington Opera, and will attempt to balance those demands with his already groaning schedule of opera performances, recording sessions and concert hall recitals. Ian White-Thomson, a former Borax USA executive, will serve as the company's executive director and chief financial overseer.

Although Hemmings was brought up in the European tradition of a single, omnipresent hands-on opera manager who supervises every aspect of the company, he recognizes that a charismatic figure like Domingo will be able to attract new donors and subscribers, particularly in this celebrity- driven town.

``There's no such thing as, 'There's only one way to run an opera company,' '' Hemmings says, ``and in recent years the complications have grown greater: the involvement of the unions, the need to charge very high prices and to do very substantial fund-raising have all escalated in recent years.

``My feeling is that, in the end, the best fund-raising is done by the person who is responsible for the artistic programming - me, at present, and Placido in the future. Because the people who give big amounts of money want to be at one with the director of the company. I'm not saying they interfere, but they like to feel that they have the ear of the director of the company.''

Hemmings will leave behind an institution that in less than a generation has gone from scratch to being one of the nation's half-dozen largest opera companies. With a $22 million budget, a subscriber base of around 17,000 and a schedule of eight productions and more than 50 performances a year, Los Angeles Opera belongs to what's generally considered the second tier of U.S. opera companies behind New York's Metropolitan Opera, Chicago's Lyric and San Francisco Opera - all older by decades than upstart Los Angeles.

Since its debut production in September 1986 of Verdi's ``Otello,'' with Domingo in the title role, Los Angeles Opera has attracted such esteemed directors as Andrei Serban, Peter Sellars and Sir Peter Hall, and designers like Hockney, Gerald Scarfe and Taymor, before her fame skyrocketed when Disney hired her to direct ``The Lion King.'' Besides its longstanding relationships with established stars like Domingo and Vaness, under Hemmings Los Angeles Opera has helped launch the careers of a number of young performers through its resident artist program. One, Gilfry, will close out the company's current season by starring in its June 3-17 production of ``Billy Budd,'' Benjamin Britten's adaptation of Herman Melville's novella.

What Los Angeles Opera is selling, Angelenos are buying in record numbers. Paid attendance for the company's 1998-99 season (the last for which complete figures are available) was a record 149,106, or 89.4 percent of capacity for the 3,086-seat Dorothy Chandler. Subscription records also were set last year.

Besides the resident artist program, Hemmings, who has a classics degree from Cambridge, sounds particularly proud of the company's initiatives aimed at widening its local audience base, such as the In-School Opera Program, which brings opera to more than 22,000 L.A. County public school students each year.

The company's Achilles' heel, asserts Allan Ulrich, classical music critic at the San Francisco Examiner, has been a lack of consistently high- quality conductors and the absence of a musical director.

``I think one of (Hemmings') problems is that he never found the consistently fine musical leadership that a major house deserves, and he knows this and we've talked about it,'' Ulrich says.

Ulrich also thinks the company's programming has grown more conservative in the last few years, in part, he believes, because Hemmings backed riskier productions early on, then found himself facing budget shortfalls. Still, Ulrich cites the Hockney-designed version of Wagner's ``Tristan und Isolde,'' a 1995 production of Debussy's ``Pelleas et Melisande'' conducted by Los Angeles Philharmonic musical director Esa-Pekka Salonen and a 1997 production of Monteverdi's ``The Return of Ulysses'' as recent examples of strong work.

Hemmings acknowledges that ``our development was retarded in the early part of the last decade'' due to factors like the 1992 civil disturbance, the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and the recession fueled by defense industry cutbacks.

``It was a difficult two or three years for everybody, and especially for fund-raisers,'' he says.

But Hemmings expects Los Angeles Opera will add a ninth opera to its season before long, after the Los Angeles Philharmonic takes up residence in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, beginning in 2002.

``I think that we can safely say that in the next 10 years we'll be up to 10 operas and 100 performances, which would make us the second-biggest opera company in the States. And we are the only major opera company that has that potential.''

The facts

--What: Peter Hemmings Celebration Concert, with Placido Domingo, Jennifer Larmore, Carol Vaness, Rodney Gilfry and Gwendolyn Bradley. Hosted by Michael York.

--Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

--When: 7:30 p.m. Monday.

--Tickets: $35 to $165. Call [phone].

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Photo:

Peter Hemmings, Los Angeles Opera's founding general director, will be honored Monday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. After 16 years, Hemmings is retiring to return to England.

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer