A Wandering Conductor Touches Down for UK/LA

After making New York City--and the Metropolitan Opera--his headquarters for most of the last decade, British conductor Jeffrey Tate last year moved back to London to assume his job with English Chamber Orchestra and a similar post, also principal conductor, with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.

“It has been good to get back home,” the 44-year-old former opera coach said recently in a telephone interview from a Richmond, Va., tour stop. “This is an opportunity to organize my life, after being a wanderer for so long.”

Tate, who will conduct the English Chamber Orchestra at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights in three UK/LA ’88 Festival events, says he and the orchestra “get on very well with each other.

“It’s a human thing. The orchestra is really quite independent--it’s never had a permanent music director. My arrangement is much looser than that would be. We work together a lot, and we make recordings. But I’m not with the orchestra all the time. It is, after all, a year-round, working orchestra, available for all kinds of engagements.”

In terms of scheduling, Tate says, his two London posts occupy perhaps half his time, leaving him free to fulfill other commitments--at Geneva Opera, for instance--and take guest-conducting engagements. However, he said he won’t be returning soon to any of the U.S. opera companies (the Met and San Francisco, principally) he has been associated with: “I’ve decided to concentrate on England and the Continent for the next two or three years.”

In the meantime, Tate expresses a certain relish at assuming his duties with the English Chamber Orchestra, in particular conducting that part of the standard repertory, the late 18th- and early 19th-Century catalogue, he likes so well.

Three separate programs will be given at the orchestra’s Pasadena concerts. Thursday, the agenda includes Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (with Frank Peter Zimmermann as the soloist).

Saturday, the program lists the Symphony No. 39 and flute concerto, K. 314, by Mozart and Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony. Sunday night, Tate will conduct Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s Chaconne in G minor, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (with Charles Rosen as soloist) and Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, “Prague.”

“I love the idea of balance,” Tate said, “and this orchestra and this music give me that.”