Opera, Without Airs : Duff Murphy’s listener-friendly commentary on KUSC brings the songs and styles down to earth.

There is nothing stuffy about Duff Murphy, host of the Saturday morning “Opera Show” on KUSC-FM (91.5), who’s celebrating his 20th anniversary on local public radio.

And, indeed, that is the way the 44-year-old real estate lawyer views his show and the music he presents. No long academic discourses or turgid analyses, weighted with dates. Just a high-energy, intelligent flow of wraparound talk, with telling detail or anecdotes about the performer or composer.

“Opera should not in any way intimidate anyone,” Murphy says. “The foreign language and the singing of words should not impede someone’s appreciation of the sound and the manner in which the composer conveys the music. And I’m not going to get in the way of that.

“The serious musicians were not stuffy,” he adds. “They did not write music for an intellectual elite.”

While still a student at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, Murphy began hosting an opera program at KPCC-FM (89.3) in January 1979, as a volunteer, and quit 15 years later when he was told in no uncertain terms that management wouldn’t pay him $50 a week. He had intended to use the money for buying albums.

“So after a couple of months of licking my wounds,” he says, “I went over to KUSC in May 1994 and started on a Friday night. Within a month of my beginning was the night of the infamous O.J. Simpson [chase]. So here I am with this surreal activity going on on the freeway. Intermittently, between each of the arias, I would kind of make some reference to where O.J. was. It was very funny doing an opera show in the middle of this.”

Today, Murphy earns $100 a week. Not the sort of billable hours that a partner at a downtown law firm commands, but that’s fine. “When you’re a volunteer, they treat you a little differently than when you’re on a payroll,” he notes. “There’s a certain degree of respect.”

Three years ago, Murphy suggested that KUSC switch him to Saturday mornings because the station’s audience for the Metropolitan Opera broadcast there was substantial, yet once the season ended, the opera audience would basically leave. KUSC agreed. So during the Met’s radio season from December to April, “The Opera Show With Duff Murphy” precedes it from from 9 to 10:30 a.m., and the rest of the year it airs from 9 a.m. to noon.

“I think of him as a gift,” says Brenda Pennell, KUSC’s general manager, who inherited Murphy from a previous regime. “At most stations, in the opera world, the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts reign supreme. But here the loyalty is split between Duff and the Met. Opera for him is a great love, but it’s his avocation. His delivery, his friendliness, his personality over the radio, combined with the music and his passion, is what draws listeners to him.”

Murphy vividly recalls feeling that passion upon hearing his first operatic voice. He was in second grade in the San Gabriel Valley and a baritone had come to sing at his religious school. He cannot tell you the name of the song but he remembers how he felt. “I was incredibly moved. His voice was so huge that I [had] a physical reaction.”

At 9, Murphy began listening to opera on the old classical music station KFAC-FM, after his parents bought him a transistor radio. He sometimes fell asleep on Sunday nights listening to German opera--during the “speaking” parts, he says, in the middle of “Fidelio” or “The Magic Flute.” Later, his love of opera deepened with a music history course he took at USC with Natalie Limonick, then head of the USC Opera Workshop.

“If there’s anything I do that I think is successful,” Murphy says of his show, “it is the manner in which I put together theme programs, and how one piece of music flows into another.”

His are essentially broad themes--sopranos of the ‘60s, Americana, opera singers doing Broadway show tunes, Scandinavian tenors, English baritones, Verdi baritones, Wagnerian baritones--giving him room to maneuver. Two weeks ago, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, he did a program on African American opera singers.

He also programs for counterbalance. When the Met recently aired Janacek’s “Katya Kabanova,” an early 20th century work with some dissonance, the kind of composition that people aren’t going to whistle tunes from, Murphy played major themes from Verdi’s melodious “Rigoletto.”

“I know when the audience is listening,” he says. “It’s kind of instinctive, and I know when the audience starts to click off. When you begin to play music that is bizarre or you play an opera that is not particularly well known, you just literally sense people leaving. And when you’ve got the good rhythm and flow, you really know the audience is there. It’s one of those sort of psychic things that most of us in radio have, and that’s why we like it so much.”

‘In the Oven’: If KABC-AM’s (790) president and general manager Bill Sommers is worried about his station’s low ratings in the most recent Arbitron survey reported two weeks ago, he sure doesn’t sound it. He says to wait.

“We’re looking for a morning show. And until we can put a show in place that can set the tone, we’re not going to see [any] significant growth.”

The morning-drive slot will likely arrive in March, he disclosed, in time for the new Arbitron quarter beginning in April. “We’re working on several opportunities. But we made a lot of changes,” he continued, implying that they take time to get used to. “Ken Minyard [whom he fired in November along with partner Peter Tilden] is not here after 29 years. We made some monumental changes and yet the station didn’t fall off the planet.”

In overall audience, the station sank to its lowest rating in this decade--a 2.4% audience share. Among 25- to 54-year-olds, the demographic advertisers favor, KABC was at 1.6%, in 22nd place, while its main talk competitors, KFI-AM (640) and KLSX-FM (97.1), had nearly double the audience at 3.1%, tied for eighth place.

“Yes, we have some work to be done. Drew [Hayes, program director] has been here six months. Now we have to put [the changes] in the oven, let it bake and see what rises.”