Directors Now Sell Orchestras They Conduct : Fund raising: Irvine-based Pacific Symphony’s newly appointed music director, Carl St. Clair, will be expected to drum up financial and moral support in the years ahead.

When the New York Philharmonic launched a fund-raising radio telethon last weekend, music director Zubin Mehta was there, using his pitch-making talents to elicit a mighty noise from a bank of telephones poised to field incoming donations.

When the St. Louis Symphony was courting a major contributor recently, music director Leonard Slatkin personally asked for a $9-million donation.

And when the Irvine-based Pacific Symphony marches through the Orange County community to drum up financial and moral support in the months and years ahead, the job of drum major will belong to newly appointed music director Carl St. Clair.

If you still think of a music director as simply a conductor who has a steady job, you’re living in the past. In addition to musician and administrator, the modern American music director also is expected to be chief cheerleader at fund-raisers, community gatherings and society soirees.

“For the Pacific Symphony, it will be critical for the music director to communicate the goals of”--in a word, sell--”the orchestra to a diverse group of people,” says executive director Louis G. Spisto. St. Clair’s job is going to involve “presenting this organization to the community: ‘This is the Pacific Symphony, this is what classical music is all about and this is why you should join us.’ ”

“It’s all very lofty to believe that music sells itself but it doesn’t,” says Leonard Slatkin of the St. Louis Symphony, who has a reputation as one of the most active and sociable music directors. “You have to do something if you want an orchestra to grow.”

“It’s very American, and something that most conductors accept as part of the territory,” says Jenny Vogel, vice president of ICM Talent Inc., a management and booking agency that represents dozens of conductors.

“A lot of Europeans,” she adds, “don’t like socializing, partying, talking money or talking nice to people who might give them money. It’s not part of their background.” But in the United States, orchestras depend evermore on private support: A proposed 2.2% increase (to $15.9 million) in the 1990 National Endowment for the Arts allocation to music organizations--of which orchestras are just one component--is the first increase of any kind in the last decade, according to Toby Halliday, director of legislative affairs at the Washington-based American Symphony Orchestra League.

That means that orchestra officials must look for every tool available to dig out precious unearned income, and those tools definitely include the music director’s ability to charm.

“People expect a music director to be a figurehead, to have a personality and to stand out from everybody else in the community,” Vogel said. “With all the marketing and advertising that is done, the way orchestras are sold today (is) very much consumer-oriented.”

A long time ago, in a musical galaxy far, far away, an orchestra’s music director was the person who decided what music the group would play, who led rehearsals presumably until that music was ready for public presentation, who perhaps selected guest soloists and who then took the bows and bouquets after the concert’s finale.

He--for it virtually always was a man--may have ranked among the lower invertebrates on the evolutionary scale of social graces, but such shortcomings were considered par for the Old World course.

This style may best have been personified by Hungarian-born conductor George Szell, who was renowned for his fiery, near-dictatorial command of the Cleveland Orchestra. He led the group to greatness during his 24-year tenure as music director, but that was a result of his Brobdingnagian musical skills, not from any efforts at wooing donors.

Today, the prune-faced authoritarian music director of yore has largely been displaced by a smiling fellow--yes, it’s still mostly a man’s world--who is expected to combine the leadership of Gandhi, the likability of Mr. Rogers and the salesmanship of Cal Worthington.

“I do more than probably a lot of people would do,” says Slatkin, noting parenthetically that his big-league pitch for $9 million brought in a donation of $1 million, which was $500,000 more than the orchestra’s development director expected from the donor. “I’ve gone to a lot of events, but never did I think of them as anything except as helping to build our endowment and doing things we need to do to help the orchestra.

“During last season we opened one of the rooms in the concert hall as a place for patrons to meet. In a way, that’s kind of elitist and goes against what I believe music should be. Then again, we need to cultivate those sources of money.”

The hard truth of modern-day musical Darwinism may be that only the suave survive.

“There’s no question in my mind that George Szell could not make music (today) the way he did before,” says Deborah Rutter, executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, whose music director, Iona Brown, is known to rub elbows with the best of them at important fund-raising events. “The community of musicians and the community of audiences is a completely different universe than it was then--100%.”

Some would disagree with that assessment, arguing that talent, no matter what face it presents, will out. But it would have to be an extraordinary talent.

“You could stand (a non-social conductor) if the product he created was such that nobody could equal it,” says Preston Stedman, a Pacific Symphony board member and head of the search committee that chose St. Clair. “He could be a reincarnation of the devil, but if he did such a beautiful job on the podium, you’d say ‘OK, that’s it.’ ”

Rutter quickly cautions that no amount of socializing skill will substitute for competence on the podium. Still, as Vogel says, if a music director doesn’t like to deal with social obligations, “it can be a real problem. One of the things that brought down (former Vancouver Symphony music director Rudolf) Barshai is that he hated doing it, refused to do it and alienated many people in the community.”

Romanian-born conductor Sergiu Comissiona was appointed in February as Vancouver’s new music director, replacing the Russian-born Barshai, who left the post in 1988 after failing, by most accounts, to establish a connection with audiences.

“He didn’t do a lot of that (community relations) side of the job--he was more concerned with the musical issues,” says Vancouver promotions manager Muriel Schubert. “In our search for a new music director,” adds Diane Hoar, the orchestra’s chief executive officer, “the search committee was very conscious of . . . an expectation our community has that our music director will be involved in the community as well as with the orchestra.”

Most orchestra officials suggest that anyone with Szell-like talent probably wouldn’t be turned down for a job. Yet, they unanimously stress the blessings of finding a musically qualified conductor who also is willing to dive into promotional activities.

“If Herbert Blomstedt said to us tomorrow, ‘I will do no more administrative tasks whatsoever; I won’t go to receptions, I won’t go to board meetings,’ we’d still want him to be our music director because we think he’s a great musician and a great music director. But we would lose something,” says Peter Pastreich, executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, adding that Blomstedt has played a direct and significant role in getting a number of major donations to the orchestra.

The Denver Symphony Assn. is in the unenviable position of having no orchestra, much less a music director. The previous director, Philippe Entremont, resigned in 1989 in frustration over budget cuts instituted by the board in an unsuccessful effort to keep the debt-plagued orchestra afloat.

Michael Maxwell, executive director of the symphony association that currently is trying to negotiate a reunion with musicians who seceded over money problems, said: “I would venture to say that if the Denver Symphony Orchestra had had at the time a strong music director--somebody of international renown, living here and far more identified with the fortunes of the orchestra--some of the events of 1989 might not have happened.”