A Long Beach Homecoming for Polivnick

When Paul Polivnick takes the Terrace Theater stage tonight to conduct the Long Beach Symphony’s first concert of the season, a lot more will be riding on his performance than a successful opening night.

Polivnick is one of five finalists in the orchestra’s yearlong search for a music director to replace Murry Sidlin, whose contract was not renewed.

Culled from a list of 250 applicants, each candidate will preside over one concert. For the 41-year-old Polivnick, music director of the Alabama Symphony for the last three years, tonight’s concert will also be a homecoming.

Fresh from Juilliard in 1969, he was appointed conductor of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra here, a post he held four years. He also played viola in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and served on the UCLA faculty, departing in 1976 to become associate conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony and, later, of the Milwaukee Symphony.

“This will be the first time I’ve conducted in the L.A. area since I left,” Polivnick said by phone last week from his Birmingham home.

“It’s exciting to come back to a place where you worked in your early period. I was a beginner then, green--I’d had just one year of conducting study at Juilliard because up till then I’d been playing violin and trumpet.

“Since then, I’ve conducted hundreds of concerts--done run-outs, pops, youth programs, state fairs, the world’s largest orchestra of 6,000 players in a Milwaukee shopping mall. There’s not a side of symphonic life I haven’t done.”

Polivnick will also face a side of symphonic life tonight that many conductors don’t experience. The Long Beach concertmaster, Kathleen Lenski, is his ex-wife. Both have remarried, and they have remained on good terms, he says.

Polivnick’s program here features the West Coast premiere of “Peace Overture” by North Carolina composer Russell Peck, which Polivnick commissioned for the Birmingham International Festival. Also on the program are Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole,” with Mark Peskanov as violin soloist.

Polivnick’s youth was spent in Westchester County, New York, where he began studying violin and trumpet at age 8. He was concertmaster at Juilliard and spent three years at the Tanglewood Festival, one of them under a conducting fellowship with Leonard Bernstein.

In Los Angeles, Polivnick had exchanged his fiddle for the viola because of the city’s abundance of violinists. After moving to Indianapolis, he gave up playing to devote his energies to conducting.

Were he to be appointed music director of the Long Beach Symphony, Polivnick said, he would try to effect “a higher standard of excellence both technically and spiritually and, naturally, I’d want the audiences to come away moved by what they were hearing.”