Former L.A. Favorite Stulberg Returns for Baroque Festival : Music: The UCLA event will showcase the genre’s hottest trend--early music performed on original instruments.

When the E. Nakamichi Foundation-sponsored Baroque Music Festival presents Mozart’s early quasi-opera, “Il Re Pastore,” at UCLA’s Royce Hall Thursday, signaling the downbeat will be a conductor once considered a major up-and-comer in Los Angeles. Lately, however, he might as well have dropped off the planet for all anyone hereabouts has heard from him.

Rest easy. Neal Stulberg, former conductor of the Young Musicians Debut Orchestra here and the Exxon/Fine Arts assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1983 to 1985, was not the victim of a lethal baton or an irate fan. He merely exchanged oranges for chilies in mid-decade, becoming the music director of the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Symphony Orchestra.

Since then, he has reaped critical hosannas akin to those usually reserved for saints or martyrs. Stulberg, interviewed between rehearsals for appearances with the Indianapolis Symphony last week, recalls, “When I accepted the position in Albuquerque, I saw an opportunity to help build an orchestra that could really make a difference to the community it serves. In the last few years we’ve been able to accomplish that.”

Actually, these days Stulberg may identify more with martyrdom than sainthood. Because of escalating costs, the New Mexico orchestra, with its $3.2-million budget, has been caught in a crunch that turned recent paydays into cliffhangers. But Stulberg remains optimistic, saying the community has responded to the orchestra’s dilemma.

Last April, in fact, Stulberg felt comfortable enough with the support to sign a year’s extension to his contract. Where he will be after next spring, however, is still very much up in the air.

In any event, Stulberg, who will also be conducting Mozart’s “Missa Solemnis” in C, K. 337, and the Piano Concerto in G, K. 453, in the course of the five-day festival, is not particularly well known for an early-music expertise or for a previous association with the Nakamichi/UCLA event.

Frederick Hammond, general director of the festival--which opens Wednesday and continues through Sunday--explains the choice of Stulberg. “I had played organ continuo for him in the Bach ‘Magnificat’ when he was with the (L.A.) Philharmonic. When I was considering various conductors, somebody reminded me of him. I discovered that, in the meantime, he had become very interested in early-music performance, so it seemed to me an interesting possibility to get a good younger conductor who was making a name for himself, and let him do his first early instrument orchestra performance with us.”

Stulberg, 36, says he “jumped at the opportunity” to conduct an orchestra like the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque, which is part of the UCLA festival. The band of 25 musicians reflects classical music’s hottest trend in generations--the exploration of baroque and classical music on original or copies of instruments that existed at the time the music was written. There are, in fact, many differences between such performances and those employing modern instruments. Audiences at Royce Hall will certainly notice the most obvious--the softer-edged tone from instruments strung with cat gut (as opposed to steel), generally crisper and faster tempos and a lower orchestral tuning.

In 1988, Stulberg won the coveted Seaver/NEA Conducting Award, which provides $50,000 over four years for career development. He decided to spend some of it studying in London with Roger Norrington, the current darling of the period-performance movement. He also spent time working with Malcolm Bilson, the fortepiano (predecessor of the modern piano) virtuoso who will be performing with Stulberg here, and studied baroque dance at Stanford last summer. “My feet are not the best for this,” he laughs, “but I did my best.”

It might reasonably occur to many that Mozart, who lived from 1756 to 1791, was not around during the period usually identified as baroque and, supposedly, celebrated by the Nakamichi series. True, some of his early music reflects baroque traditions, but it seems the real reason for Mozart’s music this week is that the biennial festival would otherwise miss next year’s worldwide whoop-dee-do commemorating the bicentennial of the composer’s death. Be that as it may, no one is complaining, certainly not Stulberg.

“ ‘Il Re Pastore’ is,” he says, “a piece that, apparently, was meant as courtly entertainment. (The work, composed when Mozart was 19, will be presented in a costumed, semistaged production at UCLA).

“It contains some extremely exciting and virtuosic music for the voice, and I’m excited to be working with this group of singers who are experienced in this kind of music. I anticipate some real vocal fireworks. It is also a delight to encounter a work by Mozart you weren’t familiar with and discover such wonderful music.”