‘Tortuous Perusal’ Narrows Field in Quest for Symphony Director

The six guest conductors announced last week for Pacific Symphony’s 1989-90 season are the latest survivors of a process of elimination that has been going on for months.

What has the process been like? What lies ahead?

Preston Stedman, head of the orchestra’s search committee, and the six other voting members have been poring over about 250 resumes, looking for an artistic director to take over when founding music director Keith Clark leaves in May.

“The process is a careful and tortuous perusal,” said Stedman, professor of music at Cal State Fullerton and longtime Pacific Symphony board member. “It takes a lot of time, but I enjoy it.”

The committee is now considering the three guest conductors who are leading the orchestra this season as well as the six who will be here the next.

While an orchestra spokesman said principal guest conductor and music adviser Kazimierz Kord, music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, is not officially a candidate, Stedman disagreed. Anyone who conducts the orchestra is “fair bait” for the job, he said.

Fewer women than expected applied and none has made it as finalists, Stedman said.

What have the committee members been looking for?

“In the first place, (the candidate) has to be intellectually superior,” Stedman said. “He must be able to store information, sort it out, make decisions that are basically artistic decisions, and, yes, do that fast. . . . And that eliminates a lot of candidates.

“He must have very sensitive aural equipment--a good ear--such that he can not only spot mistakes, but (also) in his mind, he’s able to hear what he wants. . . . Many conductors do not have that. But that’s what separates the sheep from the goats.”

Or course, the music director must “know the literature.”

“This can’t be a learning experience. If he doesn’t know the literature and he is not musical, he merely wastes the orchestra’s time because he’s not just up there to conduct beats and direct traffic,” Stedman said.

But what exactly does a conductor do, anyway? Don’t they all lead the same notes?

“Playing the notes is very important, but we could put those notes on a synthesizer and it wouldn’t sound very musical,” Stedman said. “Take the simple matter of phrasing a melody--which a computer cannot do. It’s like a computer trying to speak a sentence. It can’t do it. It can say the words, but it doesn’t sound like a sentence.

“The same thing is true in (musical) phrasing. The conductor must be able to make the phrase live, put his own imprint on it.

“Somehow the musician must realize something about the performance practices, the nuances, the interpretive leeway he has as a conductor and pull this together--and that comes from years and years of experience.”

Indeed, the committee is looking for a certain level of experience in the person who will become its new music director.

“He has to have been a music director--or at least an associate conductor--not just a guest conductor,” Stedman said.

“A conductor conducts a concert--that’s all he does. He leads rehearsals, does the concert, takes a plane and goes back to wherever he came from. That’s it.

“A music director does all the planning, recommends soloists, recommends guest conductors. He structures the whole artistic operation of the orchestra. . . . If (the candidate) is not prepared to do that, we’re not interested in him.”

But everyone insists that the candidates be heard leading the Pacific.

“We must have the orchestra’s response,” he said. “They have a real insightful way of pegging the phonies. You can’t fool those people.”

The orchestra will evaluate the candidates, each of whom will conduct two pairs of regular subscription concerts, Stedman said.

The musicians have several concerns, Stedman said. First, How does the conductor treat them? “Is he considerate, professional? Or is he a tyrant who treats them like scum. . . . After four rehearsals and a concert, they’re going to know this.”

Next, is the conductor knowledgeable and “working from some overall conception of what he wants?”

“And is he able to communicate this to the orchestra? They’ll be impressed if he’s well prepared,” Stedman said. “That’s the one thing they’ve needed.”

What no one wants is someone to turn the orchestra upside down.

“Does he want to bring his own team in? That is not the kind of conductor we can afford to hire because anybody can build an orchestra if he can bring in who he wants to. . . . That’s easy. The skill consists of taking what you’ve got and making it work better. That’s what this conductor’s got to do.”

He will have to do it with the uncommon challenge of having virtually all his players being free-lance musicians.

“A conductor has to be able to work within a situation which the Los Angeles area promotes,” Stedman said, “which is this casual, studio-musician complex operation, where musicians are involved so much of their time in a myriad of different activities--and one of these activities will be our orchestra.

“A conductor is used to having just one thing: He just does his orchestra and that’s it. It’s different down here.”

Stedman hopes, however, that the new conductor will be able to make the Pacific a household name--in Orange County at least.

“We have to get more exposure throughout the entire county,” Stedman said, “not just at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, to indicate that we are serving this county. And that is what the music director has to work on.”