Conductor Ponders His Future : Clark’s Orchestral Dream Becomes a Discord

Keith Clark must be feeling like the Conductor Without a Country these days.

A little more than a decade ago, the ambitious young conductor and fledgling composer out of UCLA’s music school traded in whatever future he might have had on the refined and cultured shores of the European continent to launch a modest orchestra in Fullerton.

With its first-year budget of $8,000 and a minuscule two-concert season in small Plummer Auditorium, the 30-member Pacific Chamber Orchestra in 1978 was a long, long way from the venerable groups Clark had been rubbing elbows with as principal guest conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra.

But the forward-thinking Clark had a dream: to create and shape an orchestra in his own mold and bring it to international acclaim. For himself, Clark wanted to be as important as Toscanini, as popular as Fiedler.

“I wanted to play as significant a role as I could in American music,” Clark once said of his decision to settle in Southern California.

Over the next 10 years, Clark steered his orchestra through the choppy waters of a community that had not previously demonstrated artistic or financial support for such a project.

Today, the Pacific Symphony has a $3.1-million annual budget and is one of the most visible presences at the $73-million Orange County Performing Arts Center.

At the same time, though, Clark’s flamboyant leadership and autocratic management style have caused a deep division among the symphony’s board of directors, which voted this week not to renew Clark’s contract.

Instead of playing him a Grand Recessional or the “Ode to Joy,” the directors seem to be singing “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Ya.”

And shortly after responding, in effect, “I will not give up the fight,” Clark jetted off to Europe to work with a Czechoslovakian orchestra that would greet him with a red carpet, not a pink slip.

The dream had become a nightmare.

Before Keith Clark founded the Pacific Chamber Orchestra at Cal State Fullerton in 1978, he was doing what most aspiring conductors were doing: guest stints with various orchestras around this country and in Europe.

When he was hired as an associate music professor at the university in 1978, his duties included expanding the student and professional groups. He created the Pacific Chamber Orchestra as a part-student, part-professional, part-community ensemble.

Soon, he was out promoting the orchestra to the Orange County music community, and in 1979 the name was changed to Pacific Symphony and the following year it was given tax-exempt status. Keith Clark was on his way.

The Pacific Symphony quickly found an audience and moved from 1,300-seat Plummer Auditorium to 2,100-seat Good Time Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm. Season ticket subscriptions leaped from 150 in the first year to nearly 3,000 in 1981.

Clark marked the orchestra’s climb with a style patterned after Bernstein: music-making with lofty artistic ideals coupled with a common-sense economic approach. Programs mixed serious works and 20th-Century music for the classical aficionado with lighter fare and guest “pops” artists such as Chet Atkins and Doc Severinsen for newcomers to orchestral music. And he delivered it all with a flashy, physically expressive conducting style.

“In our first years, our role (in the community) was different,” Clark said. “We did not have many concerts. The (Orange County) Philharmonic Society was actively presenting more standard literature. We were able to provide an alternative. I think I took advantage of that.”

The orchestra retained a homey feeling as it entered the ‘80s, through venturing ambitious programs and regular pre-concert lectures, a la Bernstein.

Clark led “Music and Apple Pie” concerts, for instance, which featured rarely played music by American composers and, literally, slices of apple pie for the audience during intermission.

Despite such crowd-pleasing tactics, after the orchestra moved to the acoustically superior Santa Ana High School Auditorium in 1982, subscriptions fell off dramatically--from 3,000 in 1981 to 600 in 1983--due in part to the less attractive physical surroundings of central Santa Ana.

But even civic decay couldn’t sidetrack Clark’s drive to glory, a drive that sometimes shifted into the high gear of overzealousness.

In 1984, he prematurely advertised a co-operative venture with San Francisco Opera, which came as a surprise to that organization’s leaders.

“Very simply, Keith Clark advertised before we ever agreed we would come,” San Francisco Opera assistant business manager William Russell said at the time. “He misled people into thinking San Francisco Opera stars would be coming and that’s not the case at all.”

Nevertheless, by 1985, largely through Clark’s unending promotion of himself and the orchestra, subscriptions edged back up to 1,175.

In this period, the symphony reached an artistic peak with adventuresome programming, both in regular subscription concerts and in a chamber music series at South Coast Repertory, which was discontinued this year.

But artistic ambition began to slide as Orange County headed into the era of the Center.

Although Clark said he “remained unconvinced of a relationship between repertory and . . . ticket sales,” he began offering more bread-and-butter repertory once the orchestra moved uptown to Segerstrom Hall.

“Standard literature builds orchestra technique,” he said. “If you’re going to take our orchestra seriously, you have to establish an ensemble style of playing Mozart or Beethoven symphonies.”

This was a shift from Clark’s philosophy of earlier years, when he had said: “Obviously, the meat and potatoes of an orchestra’s life is bound to be the central European music of Brahms and Beethoven. But it’s downright un-American for us not to know our own music.”

Early in the planning of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Clark envisioned it as a permanent home for his orchestra and started lobbying. But by promoting the group as the “Resident Professional Orchestra of Orange County,” Clark butted heads with the existing Center leadership, which loudly and firmly insisted there would be no resident groups at the facility.

Meanwhile, Clark was rubbing associates in his own organization the wrong way because of his insistence on control over all areas of the Pacific Symphony’s operation, from programming concerts to advertising campaigns.

Since 1983, Pacific Symphony has had four executive directors: Robert Elias, who resigned after six weeks to join the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in Pasadena; Topper Smith, who left in 1985 after 13 months, also to work for the LACO, and Wesley O. Brustad, who left abruptly and without explanation in 1985 after only three months. He followed Elias and Smith to Pasadena.

Current executive director Louis G. Spisto came aboard last June from the Pittsburgh Symphony, but as an administrative equal to Clark rather than as his subordinate, as his predecessors had been.

Elias, who had worked at the Orange County Philharmonic Society before his six-week pit stop at the Pacific Symphony, later said he thought that the orchestra’s quality continued to improve “in spite of Keith Clark, not because of him.”

In fact, much of the recent debate over Clark’s continuing leadership of the orchestra has revolved around whether it has outgrown him.

The Pacific has received good and bad reviews over the years, but critics have become increasingly disenchanted with Clark’s abilities since the group moved to the Performing Arts Center.

Before, Clark sometimes was indulged as a big fish in a little pond. But critics have been less willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt now that he is on the same stage, often within the same week, as such internationally recognized conductors as Sir Georg Solti, Kurt Sanderling and Christoph von Dohnanyi.

Of the orchestra’s first concert at the Center in October, 1986, Times music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer wrote: “The get-acquainted program turned out to be a stultifying celebration of the trite and the untrue. . . . The Berlioz (‘Roman Carnival’ Overture) sounded like a spotty run-through. Strauss’ ‘Don Juan’ exulted, rather jerkily, in breathless flamboyance for its own empty-headed sake. Respighi’s supremely vulgar ‘Pines of Rome’ emerged even more tawdry than usual.”

On the podium, Clark often had as much difficulty establishing an easy rapport with guest soloists as he did off the podium with fellow administrators.

Bernheimer described Clark’s support of violin soloist Henryk Szeryng in Brahms’ Violin Concerto as “sledge-hammer accompaniment.”

Another Times reviewer said Clark’s support of clarinetist Richard Stoltzman was “pedestrian” at an October concert and that Clark’s accompaniment of soprano Roberta Peters at a New Year’s Eve performance was “heavy, dragging, occasionally overpowering.”

Questions about Clark’s musical preparation, interpretation of repertory and accompaniment of soloists would recur throughout the first Center season.

In May, 1987, Orange County Register music critic James Chute wrote: “Keith Clark and the Pacific Symphony closed their first season in the same disappointing way that they had opened it. . . . Clark did not so much interpret the music as much as he merely kept time. And he didn’t keep time all that well.”

Clark’s future with the orchestra he nursed from infancy to adolescence is uncertain.

Far from facing a unanimous call for his ouster, Clark maintains many supporters, both on the board of directors and with a public he has charmed, and he expects them to rally to his aid and shore up his position at the symphony’s helm.

But at the same time, Clark is taking greater advantage of outside opportunities. He still holds down the post of musical director of the Cathedral Concert Orchestra in New Jersey and also is exploiting guest conducting stints with the Czechoslovak Radio Symphony, the Slovak Philharmonic, the Seoul Philharmonic in Korea and other foreign orchestras.

For now, Clark stands waiting in the wings, not knowing whether he’ll be called out for an encore or sent back to the dressing room.

Times staff writer Chris Pasles contributed to this story.