A Hill Walker Hits the Right Notes

When John Currie moved to Los Angeles to become the music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 1986 it didn’t mean an end to his favored activity, hill walking. Here it’s called hiking , but Currie trained vigorously for years in the lush hills of his native Scotland, bounding up peaks and around lochs. Traveling throughout the world has allowed him to hill walk in some exotic locales, from the Austrian Alps to Israel’s desolate Judean hills . Since moving to the United States he’s explored the terrain around California and Nevada. The Master Chorale’s season opener, “Americana! A Festival of American Music,” is at 8 p.m. on Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Between rehearsals , Currie set out on an early morning 6-mile hike in Malibu Creek State Park and talked about his passion for hill walking.

“I’ve been hill walking since I was a kid. Probably my parents first took me on walks. My father was a railway man and he loved trains, they were his whole life. We would often go by train to quite remote places. They were like the end of the world, quite extraordinary, and we walked there.

“I grew up in Prestwick, a beach resort in the southwest of Scotland. Where I lived you could bicycle inland to reach the hills, or take a train. To do a real hill walk, I would have to the southern highlands or go inland and do some river walks.

“The terrain here in some ways is visually similar to Scotland, and in other ways it’s very different. Scotland has some spectacularly difficult walking and climbing, but the highest mountain is just over 4,000 feet. There are far fewer people in Scotland, which is nice, so you can really be in some very, very remote places. The main difference in terrain is that in Scotland you can strike out across the heather, provided it’s not too boggy. Heather’s great to walk on, it’s very bouncy.

“There was a period of 10 or 12 years when I had a really crazy schedule, I was really busy. I was never outside. I’d be rehearsing all day and the theater had no windows. I did miss it; it’s kind of like a thirst, you begin to yearn for it.

“When I moved to California people gave me these excellent books put out by the Sierra Club that tell you about the terrain. One of the pleasures of walking is that you’re drinking it in with your eyes all the time. My first time here it looked scrubby and dry and then it begins to say something to you.

“I had experiences with deserts in Israel, walking in the Judean hills. At first deserts seem to be not be very pretty, and then your eye gets used to them and sees different lights. It’s the fact that everything’s brown for most of the year here, and that takes some getting used to. Brown in the north of Europe means dead, but then you get used to that and you see it quite differently.

“When I first came here I went on one long walk in this very park with a friend who’s a very experienced walker. He introduced me to this kind of terrain. But mostly I do it on my own, and the simple reason is that different people do it at different paces, and it’s just preferable to do it alone. You can pace yourself and take shortcuts. There are one or two people I like to walk with because we seem to have the same length legs.

“A good walker has to have stamina, the ability to get that second wind. I tend to do the hard stuff in the beginning. In most terrains you can do wonderful walks at very high levels, and the real sweat’s getting up there. What I tend to do is go up there like mad first thing in the morning and stay up there all day and come down later.

“I miss the lochs, or lakes, here. Scotland is like Minnesota with mountains. There are just thousands of small and large lochs, some at very high altitudes. You’re always coming on one, always coming over some kind of peak or ridge and suddenly you see one of these great watery things parading out before you. Some of them are very beautiful, some rather bleak and bare.

“When I’m out here obviously I’m free from the telephone and the fax machine. Once you’re really away you do think about things that you don’t have time to think about and it becomes very unpressured. Sometimes you can go on a vacation and you never really get rid of the stress. With walking it doesn’t take long.

“There are thousands of places I’d like to walk that I haven’t explored yet, even in Scotland. The thing about walking is, say you do 20 square miles in a day--you’ve only covered a tiny part of the terrain. It would take a lifetime to know really well even a very small country.”