Jon Robertson: A Romance in Long Beach?

“This is not a date,” says Jon Robertson about his guest-conducting engagement with the Long Beach Beach Symphony tonight at the Long Beach Convention Center. “This is courtship for marriage.”

In the sharply competitive world of conducting, Robertson explains, there is no room, and no time, for casual relationships.

The 46-year-old, Jamaica-born, Los Angeles-raised, Juilliard-trained conductor and pianist is one of at least five candidates for the post of music director of the Long Beach orchestra, and admits freely, “Yes, I am interested in the job.” This is no time for coyness.

This week, Robertson, fourth of five conductors leading the ensemble this season, has been on view in Long Beach--rather like a Rose Bowl Parade float is on view, for the community to scrutinize.

Not only is he conducting rehearsals for his Strauss/Bartok/Dvorak program tonight, Robertson is also meeting the players, talking to the search committee, becoming acquainted with members of the board of directors and the orchestra’s support groups. Tonight at 7, one hour before the performance in Terrace Theater, he will give the preconcert lecture--an event that some members of the audience consider even more important in assessing the potential music director than the actual concert.

How does the candidate feel about all this? Bemused, he says, and not very nervous.

“Whatever I do during this period,” Robertson said, over lunch last week, “I’m going to be myself, and just try to do my best.

“As a candidate, I don’t think I necessarily have an edge on anybody else--or any great handicap, either. Chemistry is what happens or doesn’t happen between a conductor and an orchestra. We’ll see what happens here.”

In any case, the conductor of the Redlands Symphony (since 1984) says, “I’m fortunate in one very important thing. I’ve been allowed to grow as a musician out of the mainstream. That’s been a tremendous advantage for me, personally.”

Until the early 1970s, when Robertson’s wife “sat me down one day and made me admit that conducting is what I wanted to do, more than anything else,” this professional musician was giving concerts as a pianist, teaching (at that time at a college in central Massachusetts) and “playing at being an academic conductor.”

After finally acknowledging his dream, Robertson took himself and his young family to Loma Linda in the summer of 1975 to study with Herbert Blomstedt.

Subsequently, Blomstedt (now music director of the San Francisco Symphony) invited Robertson to come to Sweden for further study; later the young conductor followed Blomstedt to Dresden, East Germany. In 1979, Robertson was offered his first post, as conductor of the symphony orchestra in Kristiansand, Norway, where he remained for seven years. He is now in his fifth season as leader of the Redlands Symphony.

“Of course I would keep Redlands if I got the job in Long Beach,” Robertson said.

“But, no, I wouldn’t repeat programs. These are two separate orchestras, with different needs. I certainly have enough repertory to go around. In seven years in Norway, I think I repeated a total of four works.” Does he specialize in contemporary music? Robertson smiles at the possible trap his answer might put him in.

“I like to program contemporary music, and I’ve done a lot of it, wherever I go. But not as an agony--as a new experience, part of the ongoing experience the listener has in discovering music he hasn’t known before.”

Robertson--who took three degrees, including a doctorate, from his years at Juilliard, and is also an ordained minister who serves a small congregation of 100 in Pomona--is proud of his record at the Redlands Symphony.

“I think the orchestra and its audience are unique. From Day One, this audience never clapped between movements, for instance. And the former community orchestra is strictly a professional group now.

“We have two series, one of five Saturday-night, big-orchestra concerts, and another, Sunday-afternoon, classical-size ensemble concerts. Most of our subscribers--and we have a sold-out audience of 1,600 in a community of only 50,000 people--buy both series.”

But Robertson relishes the challenge of Long Beach, which is an orchestra “I consider a class act--one that came back from financial disaster, has suffered a number of traumas, and still has the ability to play beautifully.

“Obviously, there is some healing that needs to be done. And someone--the board, the players, or the new music director--needs to chart a course in the long term for this orchestra, to put a fingerprint on it. There can’t be too many more traumas if this fine instrument is going to survive.”