CONDUCTOR ON THE SIDE OF YOUTH

Instilling a love of classical music in young people is difficult. Youthful minds so resentful of restrictions must come to grips with the complexities of an orchestra and the intricacies of compositional form.

After all, everyone knows that kids just wanna have fun.

Rachael Worby, recently named youth concerts conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, not only understands that youthful energy--she revels in it. “I’m on the side of young people,” she says.

Her job, as she sees it, is to “make the kids feel they are an integral part of a universe from which they’ve felt excluded.

“Young people need to feel positive, happy and confident about who they are and what they know,” she says, displaying a level of enthusiasm that is infectious. “With that sense of self, they can go on to include other things in their lives.”

But what about discipline? How can she make those busy little people be quiet and listen? Worby shudders visibly. “I’m not interested in discipline. The root of the word is ‘disciple.’ I don’t want that. I want the kids to be talking during a concert--being alive , being there. “ Worby is one of those who tends to talk in italics.

“Do you know that when I recently led a youth concert at Carnegie Hall, they were dancing in the aisles? I mean dancing !”

The involvement of this country’s youth in symphonic music is crucial to the continued well-being of its orchestras, Worby asserts. “We’re lost in music in the next 20 years if we don’t pay attention to these people.”

At 35, the bicoastal conductor (she still maintains an apartment in New York while house-sitting here at the home of music critic Alan Rich) has already accumulated enough experience in conducting youth concerts to know the pitfalls of most outreach programs.

“Some orchestras perceive each season as merely a certain number of services (the term for any formally organized gathering of players). Fortunately, that is not the case with the Philharmonic here. The orchestra players care about these concerts, and about making a connection with the kids. And the management, too, knows the importance of these activities.”

Worby estimates she will give about 30 to 40 in-school concerts each fall and spring. This, in addition to the handful of Saturday-morning programs at the Music Center.

Not to mention such special events as the “gi-GANTIC” concert she will lead May 15 at Hollywood Bowl. The Philharmonic will bus in 7,000 to 10,000 students from 125 schools for a concert.

How will Worby adjust to such a mob? She won’t. “I’ll do the same stuff,” she replies. “I always spend a lot of time in the audience with the kids.

“I discovered that a lot of young people were intimidated with this thing (the orchestra) on stage. I’ve worked a lot on that in the in-school events. We’re trying a new program: I’ll take a small ensemble, like a wind quintet, and spend 30 minutes with a group of kids, letting them touch the instruments.

“I’ve done that with handicapped kids. To see a flicker of light in their faces, to see them suddenly come alive. . . .”

As she points out more than once, Worby is a conductor for grown-ups too. Witness her appearance during the Philharmonic’s Cinco de Mayo Festival at the Music Center on Sunday.

“I’m a conductor for a reason,” she says. “Through music and conducting, I can touch the lives of all kinds of different people. And that makes my devotion to music as profound as it is.”