Classic Arts Showcase Adds Ballet, Opera to Late Night

Take heart, all you insomniacs and other late-night, predawn folk. Beginning tonight, you won’t have to rely on TV infomercials, or movies you wouldn’t have paid to see 30 years ago, or radio psychologists giving other people advice that calls into question your own behavior.

Classic Arts Showcase--dubbed the “CNN of culture” or “MTV of the Arts”--might be just your ticket.

With material garnered from laserdiscs, archives and private collections, Classic Arts offers a quick and easy taste of about 15 artistic disciplines from around the world, including music, architecture, fine art, documentaries, dance, film and animation. It presents about a dozen three- to five-minute video clips in hourlong segments.

During April and May, Classic Arts will air nightly from about 1 (depending on when regular programming ends) to 5 a.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 (except Thursdays, when the station will be dark for transmitter maintenance).

Classic Arts is the passion and brainchild of philanthropist Lloyd E. Rigler, a founder of the Kennedy Center, co-chairman of New York City Opera and a former longtime KCET board member, who several years back purchased 12 years of satellite time for $26 million to provide the service.

“I’m very pleased KCET finally is testing us,” said Rigler, who launched Classic Arts on May 3, 1994, his 79th birthday, barely concealing some impatience. “We’ve been after them.”

What took so long? Jackie Kain, KCET’s director of broadcasting, explained that the station had to upgrade its satellite dish to be able to download Classic Arts. KCET had previously tested the service for one weekend in July 1994, but the station had to use tapes.

“We like the service a lot,” Kain said. “It’s definitely for two months. It presents the classical arts for people who may not be able to go to the concert hall . . . to subscribe to the Los Angeles Philharmonic or go hear an absolutely beautiful opera.”

Already seen nationally on more than 200 outlets and available locally on educational cable-access channels in Beverly Hills, Pasadena, West Hollywood and Malibu, Classic Arts has the potential on KCET for reaching a much wider audience.

It was Rigler’s goal, as the series notes at the top of each hourlong compilation of clips, to “bring the classic arts experience to the largest audience possible . . . in hopes that we may tempt you, the viewer, to go out and feast from the buffet of arts available in your community.”

But might Classic Arts be better dubbed McArts because of its MTV-like approach?

“They’re very mindful of what they’re doing,” Kain says of the service. “You’re hearing one aria, one movement or seeing one extraordinary ballet piece. It’s coherent, integrated, not chopped up. They are short bites, but the work itself is being respected.”

Among the fare that will be offered beginning at about 1 a.m. tonight are Beverly Sills singing an aria from “The Barber of Seville” in 1976; Julie Andrews doing a recording of “Edelweiss” in 1994; a piece from the ballet “Alice in Wonderland” done recently for Czech television; and a Ravel orchestral piece as background to film of the architecture of Grenada, Spain.

KCET officials say viewer response will dictate whether they decide to continue the night owl service, which is costing the station about $5,000 a month to run.