Pianist Has Full Schedule Off the Stage

Most soloists with the San Diego Symphony play their obligatory concerto, pick up their check and quickly board a plane to their next destination. Pianist Stephen Drury, who will play Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto Thursday and Friday with the orchestra, is sticking around after his Symphony Hall performances--and not just to soak up sun on the beaches.

In various schools and community centers around San Diego County, Drury will be playing informally for senior citizens and elementary school children. He will give a master class for aspiring pianists at Carlsbad High School next Wednesday, and will perform a solo evening recital April 24 at the Carlsbad Cultural Arts Center.

It’s not that Drury is an altruistic arts missionary, however. The 28-year-old performer and member of the New England Conservatory of Music faculty is part of Affiliate Artists, the New York City-based program that sponsors a two-week residency surrounding a young performer’s orchestral appearance.

“During my residency, I spend time every day in smaller meetings with people closer to their homes,” Drury said. “They have a term for it-- informance --which is a kind of informal meeting where I play and talk. It’s a way to draw people into the arts other than going to a concert and seeing something happen on a stage.”

Drury did a similar residency in 1986 in Spokane, Wash., and next season he will travel to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Stamford, Conn., for the remainder of his Affiliate Artists engagements. When Drury does an “informance,” he always includes contemporary keyboard music, not only because of his own strong convictions about playing music of his own era, but because it usually gets the listeners’ attention more readily than playing standard repertory.

“Sure, I’ve found that people will listen and enjoy Chopin and Schumann, but they get really excited when I play Ives, mostly because they’ve never heard it before. For high school students, standard repertory is kind of a turn-off. You come in and play Ives or Crumb, because it’s not a known quantity, their interest peaks.”

Giving a master class in front of a school assembly tests both Drury’s teaching skills and his ability to hold the attention of the young performers’ peers in the audience.

“In private lessons, over the course of a year I can get results a little at a time,” he said. “But in a public situation, I need to effect evident differences right away.”

Drury’s consciousness of audience reaction reflects his theater experiences, which go back to directing a production of “Hair” during his senior year at Harvard. Not surprisingly, he began working with that production in a musical capacity.

“I was asked to be musical director, but I couldn’t find lead singers. I had noticed that the guy who was supposed to direct the production had been walking around singing one of the lead songs. I finally said to him, ‘Look, you want to sing this,’ and he looked back at me and said, ‘You want to direct, don’t you?’ ”

Drury noted that his activities in musical theater don’t fit the usual classical pianist’s profile, and he admitted that much of his stage work after college was helpful only in paying the rent.

“The bread was amazing, but there comes a point when it’s just not worth the money,” he said.

Projects with enfant terrible director Peter Sellars, however, fell into a different category.

“With Peter, even being a rehearsal pianist was rewarding,” Drury said.

In Boston, he worked as a pit musician with Sellars while refining “My One and Only,” before it went off to New York City, and for American Repertory Theatre’s “The Inspector General,” he was Sellars’ musical director.

Drury’s exposure to Sellars’ theatrical vision has had practical application, even at the staid New England Conservatory, where he just completed directing and conducting a performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” a musical monodrama about England’s demented George III.

“We conceived the vocalist not as a mad king, but as a homeless person off the streets who perhaps thought he was a king--putting on the airs of a king to confound those around him. It worked out well. The madness of kings is not the tragedy it once was, not when you can walk down the street and see greater tragedies every day.”