First Guest Conductor of Season to Lead Pacific Symphony Tonight

“I’m only now having first contact, and I must say I find the orchestra quite wonderful. Any conductor would be happy to work with such an orchestra on a regular basis.”

Lawrence Foster had just finished a morning rehearsal with the Pacific Symphony in its unusual work space, a converted 1920s-era Presbyterian church in downtown Santa Ana. (At one point, a police siren’s wail came through the open stained-glass transom. “I was that bad?,” Foster quipped.) Tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Foster will lead the orchestra in the opening concert of the season--its first full season without founding director Keith Clark.

Foster and the five other guest conductors who will be appearing this season are generating more than the usual amount of interest, for any of them could be under consideration as the new music director.

Does Foster think of himself a candidate?

“I can’t say, in all honesty,” he said. “One has to consider it a mutual expression of interest. It’s up to the people here to see if they like what I do, and I guess it’s up to me to see if I feel at ease with the orchestra.”

Clark left the symphony last season after 10 years. Development of the 1989-90 Classics Series was overseen by Kazimierz Kord, principal guest conductor and music adviser, who will lead three of the concerts himself.

But Foster, like each of the other guest conductors--Christopher Seaman, Zdenek Macal, Carl St. Clair, Richard Buckley, Sergiu Comissiona--has designed a program that will showcase his own abilities. Tonight’s concert (which will be repeated Wednesday), includes Bartok’s First Piano Concerto (with Peter Donohoe as soloist), “Die Moldau” from Smetana’s “Vlast” and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 (“The Great”) in C Major.

“It’s like a cathedral,” he said of the Schubert work. “The specialty of that piece is its amazing sustenance of one great arch--one long line of melody from beginning to end. After you’ve been through the Schubert 9, you feel cleansed and optimistic. It’s a real affirmation of life . . . so beautiful and noble and popular at the same time.”

It is, however, taxing for musicians, especially violinists. One of its challenges, to conductor and players alike, is conveying a sense of ease and of tranquility in playing a work that demands some fatiguing techniques.

Foster has for 11 years been music director of the Monte Carlo Philharmonic, a post he will be leaving soon, Although his primary residence has been Monaco, he is a Los Angeles native, and his musical ties with Southern California are strong. From 1965 to 1968, he was assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, and he has been a frequent guest conductor at the Hollywood Bowl.

He led the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Company’s inaugural production of “Otello” in 1986, and he will return to the Music Center this season for “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Falstaff.”

Of the musical climate in Southern California, he said: “Musicians tend to play quite colorfully here. There’s a certain self-understood virtuosity and a sense of responsibility for intonation that you don’t always find. The real work has to be done in homogenizing and bringing things together so that it really sounds like one ensemble.”

What might Lawrence Foster bring to an orchestra like the Pacific Symphony?

“What I’d like to bring is what I try to bring to any place I go: music-making with enthusiasm, with warmth, and with commitment. I think there’s a general need all over for music to be made on as high a level as possible, and conveyed to a large public without playing down to that public.

“I think there’s a real need and function for music in today’s society. It’s a wonderful thing. It can be a great deal of fun; it can also be very disturbing. But it really gives people a chance to become one with themselves. Otherwise, you’re just in a concrete jungle.

“What is the purpose of our prosperity, our comfort, if not to have the time and the desire to also develop the soul and the spirit?”

Lawrence Foster conducts the Pacific Symphony in Smetana’s “Die Moldau,” Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (with soloist Peter Donohoe) and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 (“The Great”) tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $9 to $42. Repeats Wednesday. Information: (714) 556-2787.