O.C. MUSIC : The Conductor as a Musical Medium : Performance: ‘Music and notes are not living things,’ Kazimierz Kord says, so ‘someone must touch the notes. . . . Otherwise, they are dead.’

In a familiar cartoon, a conductor looks at a score that directs him to “wave your arms a lot, then turn around and bow when the music stops.”

In another cartoon, the score simply reads, “Tum-de-tum. Tum-de-tum. Tum-de-tum.”

What does a conductor actually do up there on the podium? And is he (usually it’s a man, though that is slowly changing) all that necessary?

“It is a very simple question, but the answer is very complicated, I must say,” said Kazimierz Kord, the music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, who is serving as music adviser of the Pacific Symphony while it searches for a new music director. Kord will lead the Pacific in music of Schubert, Schumann and Mahler tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“Music and notes are not living things,” Kord said. “Someone must touch the notes, and someone must think how they should all sound once again. Otherwise, they are dead.”

Kord’s approach is to read scores again and again.

“Take, for instance, (Verdi’s) ‘Falstaff,’ which I am now working on for the San Francisco Opera. I did ‘Falstaff’ with (the great baritone) Geraint Evans 10 years ago, and I thought I heard everything that was possible to hear in it. Now once again I look at the score, and I hear it absolutely, totally differently.

“What does that mean? I used to like precision. Now I don’t like only precision. I like precision that leads somewhere, which I didn’t realize so much in the past as now.”

In opera, Kord said, “there are so many dramatic things that you have to connect with the music--whether to treat a passage with more lyricism or with more humor, or maybe more sharply, maybe more softly. . . . Everything you do is part of your search to connect the drama with the music, and afterwards to see how it is all built logically. . . . There is not even one note without sense because it is such a genius as Verdi.”

That approach works for symphony music too, he said.

“You take a note and look, where does it lead? What does it go to? It has to have meaning all the time in what you are doing, in every moment. . . .

“In Brahms’ Fourth Symphony (which Kord will conduct in May), my God, what a meaning there is in everything. . . . You look at that score and hear what the musicians are playing, and suddenly you realize that to make one note different is simply illogical; that if you do, the building goes down immediately.

“I think that is true, and the great conductors realize that.”

Nonetheless, there is an enormous range of difference among interpretations by great conductors, according to Kord.

“They all had the same notes that Beethoven wrote, for example, in his Sixth Symphony, and yet look how differently it is played by each of them,” he said. “Where are the differences? There are differences in intonation, differences in contrasts in sound, differences in articulation, depending on the sharpness or the dry playing or the warm playing or in a lot of aspects like that.”

There are even differences in the way an orchestra sounds.

“The Chicago (Symphony) has a certain kind of playing style,” Kord said. “So does the Cleveland (Orchestra) with its chamber playing, the Philadelphia (Orchestra) with its marvelous velvet string playing and so on.

“How did that happen? Because of the conductor, a certain kind of mentality, temperament, and so on. . . . Style is a question of timing, of how you react, how you breathe; simply, what is important for you in this moment and how you build from it.”

What bothers Kord is the new “objectivity” that seeks to obliterate this kind of individuality among contemporary artists.

“What disturbs me enormously is that many times I do not recognize the pianist who plays,” he said. “If you hear (Vladimir) Ashkenazy, he plays fantastically. If afterwards you hear another pianist, such as (Maurizio) Pollini or someone else, he also is fantastic. In both cases, it is perfection which you hear.

“But I don’t think perfection is a good at all, not at all. If perfection is what you’re looking for, go to a pharmacist. There you have an absolutely perfect level of something because you need it. But don’t go to a concert!

“You must be brave enough to resist this kind of pressure, (that) you must be perfect all the time. . . . People try to make it safe for themselves. They do not have enough bravery to be free, to really be free. This is very important.”

Kazimierz Kord conducts the Pacific Symphony in Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” with mezzo-soprano Sondra Gelb and Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, “The Unfinished,” tonight and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $9 to $52. Information: (714) 556-2787.