MUSIC : St. Clair, Candidate for Music Director, at Pacific Symphony

As a conductor, Carl St. Clair was a bit of a late bloomer.

“I didn’t hear an orchestra until I was 17,” St. Clair said in a recent interview. “The first orchestra I ever heard, I played in it. It was the Texas All-State Orchestra, and I played first trumpet. I didn’t know a viola from a cello. I didn’t know an English horn. We didn’t have English horns.

“I don’t tell that to many people because they think, ‘How can you know how to conduct?’ ”

He’s managed to learn. For the past four years, St. Clair has been one of two assistant conductors at the prestigious Boston Symphony (the other is Pascal Verrot), and this summer he toured with Leonard Bernstein, conducting concerts in East Berlin, Leningrad, Milan, Paris and Rome, among other European hot spots.

He will lead the Pacific Symphony today and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the latest candidate to replace Keith Clark as a music director of the orchestra.

Is he interested in abandoning Boston for Costa Mesa?

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise,” St. Clair said in the restaurant of a Costa Mesa hotel. “I have a wonderful musical life right now. I have a variety of musical experiences, guest conducting being one of them. . . . And I’m music director in two other cities, Ithaca, N.Y., and Ann Arbor (Mich.).” But it is time to move on.

“This will be my last year as assistant conductor” in Boston, he said. “When I joined the Boston Symphony four years ago, I knew . . . that four years would be a sort of maximum length. That’s true of assistant anything--assistant principals, assistant coaches, everything.

“I’ve really have had no frustration in being assistant with Boston.” Still, what he wants now is “to be a music director of a very high-quality young orchestra, in an exciting musical environment, and that is one of the reasons that (the Pacific Symphony) interested me.”

He does not see his responsibilities in Ann Arbor and Ithaca precluding an appointment to the Pacific.

“Those (jobs) take considerable energy but not so much time,” he said. “As far as actual weeks of conducting, because of the size of their seasons, I’m about six weeks at each place.”

However, “I think it’s important that I maintain guest-conducting engagements as much as I can,” he added. “I think that’s vital to the growth of an individual.”

St. Clair, 37, was born in southwestern Texas, in a German farming community of “a little over 30 people . . . the kind you go through in less than a minute.” He began playing piano--under duress--when he was 6. “To get as your sixth birthday present piano lessons, in south Texas, well, that just didn’t go over very well. (But) I realize now it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

Piano faded, however, when he began playing trumpet in a high school band. “Piano classes were like 27 miles in one direction and school was in the other direction. Lessons became impossible because we were one of these one-car, mini-tractor kind of families. It just got too hectic, so I just decided to play the trumpet.”

He got serious about his musical interest when he played in the Texas All-State Orchestra, then conducted by Donn Laurence Mills, now head of the music department at Chapman College in Orange and founding director of the fledgling Capistrano Symphony.

“I oftentimes wondered what happened to him,” St. Clair said. “I often wanted to tell him how important that was to me.”

St. Clair found his future vocation while studying trumpet at the University of Texas at Austin. Walter Ducloux, a student of Felix Weingartner and assistant to Toscanini with the NBC Symphony, was advertising for an assistant and St. Clair applied.

Initially, he says, conducting wasn’t a burning desire as much as “a money situation. I needed an assistantship to go to school, and that was the only one available. (But) I must have shown some knack. (Ducloux) only watched for five or six minutes, and that was it.”

Realizing that conductors need an intimate knowledge of string instruments, St. Clair began studying violin and cello. “I never tried to become proficient, just intelligent so I could speak and know the instrument, its difficulties and possibilities.”

After graduation, he taught music at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville from 1976-78, then moved to the University of Michigan to teach conducting for eight years. “It allowed me time to really develop a rehearsal ability, technique, conducting craft, and it also allowed me to get to know myself as a conductor in relationship with orchestra musicians.”

After an international audition, he became a conducting fellow at Tanglewood, Mass., the summer home of the Boston Symphony, in 1985. The following January he auditioned for the orchestra’s assistant conductor’s post. “And I have been there since.”

For all his recent glamorous international jaunts, St. Clair continues to regard himself as a hometown boy.

“In a very special place, I’m a Texan,” he said. “I will always be. I have so many great roots there and my family is there and our land is there. . . . I put the whole town on videotape this past Christmas from my grandfather’s pickup truck, the whole city, every house, who lived there and who lived there before them.”

Why? “Because it’s vanishing . . . there are no young people there any more. . . . Although I recognize many of the things it lacked or that it didn’t offer me, I can’t hold that against it now. It offered me a lot of other things that I’m just now realizing--a certain sense of values, a certain set of priorities, a certain discipline. I didn’t get a lot of things, but I did get things I couldn’t have gotten other places.”

So he tries to repay the debt.

“I conduct the Texas All-State Orchestra whenever they ask,” he said. “I feel a indebtedness to that.”

Carl St. Clair will conduct the Pacific Symphony in music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Mahler today and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Soloist will be soprano Benita Valente. Tickets: $9 to $30. (Student/Senior rush tickets, $5, one-half hour before curtain time.) Information: (714) 740-2000.

Dates for previously announced repertory during the American Ballet Theatre’s March 6 to 18 run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center have been announced by Center officials.

March 6, 8 p.m.: Ashton’s “Birthday Offering,” Clark Tippet’s “Some Assembly Required,” Tudor’s “Jardin aux Lilas,” Twyla Tharp’s “Push Comes to Shove.” March 7, 8 p.m.: “Birthday Offering,” “Jardin aux Lilas,” de Mille’s “Rodeo.” March 8, 8 p.m.: Natalia Makarova’s staging of the “Kingdom of the Shades” (Act II) from “La Bayadere,” Tharp’s “Brief Fling,” “Rodeo.” March 9 to 11 and 13 to 15 at 8 p.m. and March 10 and 11 at 2 p.m.: MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet.”

March 16, 8 p.m.: Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations,” “Some Assembly Required,” Tudor’s “Dark Elegies,” Tharp’s “In the Upper Room.” March 17, 2 p.m.: “La Bayadere” (Act II); de Mille’s “The Informer,” “In the Upper Room.” March 17, 8 p.m.: “Birthday Offering,” “Brief Fling,” “Theme and Variations.” March 18, 2 p.m.: “La Bayadere” (Act II), “Dark Elegies,” “Theme and Variations.” March 18, 8 p.m.: “La Bayadere” (Act II), “The Informer,” “Push Comes to Shove.”

Information: (714) 556-2787.