‘They’ll call it reactionary. I don’t care. I wrote it with conviction, passion.’

In a casual moment Tuesday evening, over dinner at Fresco, maestro Lalo Schifrin allowed that trips to Paris can be a little overtaxing.

There are dinner parties, social functions, excursions to chateaux.

“You have to be there five days,” he said with a melancholy compression of the brow, suggesting that sometimes he might rather be composing.

Such are the demands on the music director of the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra.

But in Glendale, where Schifrin embarks Sunday on his second season in the equivalent position, duty is a simpler, more personal task. Schifrin and his wife Donna, who is also his business manager, drove from their Beverly Hills home, stopping for an early dinner before a date with the ladies and gentlemen of the Glendale Symphony Assn. The occasion was one of the association’s salons, large gatherings in a member’s home with food and a musical interlude. More than 100 members came to Tuesday’s in a modern home in the hills above Kenneth Road.

They were solid Glendale folk--in conservative business attire and of corresponding manner. They filled two wings of folding chairs, in the living room and an adjoining outdoor deck. A microphone was placed in between near a sliding glass door.

The performer played a bagpipe, previewing a number in the orchestra’s popular Christmas concert. But this evening belonged to the former Argentine jazz musician turned Hollywood composer--and now maestro.

In the fluid accent that provokes endless adjectives about Latin charm, Schifrin shaped the evening into a warm convocation with his new friends in Glendale.

“I want to say that I feel very good working with the Glendale Symphony,” he began, “because, you know that most of the musicians in the orchestra have been working with me in the studio for a long, long time so they are friends.”

Friendship was his theme in a 20-minute monologue outlining the coming season. It is to be a cavalcade of his personal friends from Hollywood, beginning with Doc Severinsen, who will play trumpet solo Sunday in the premiere of a piece Schifrin wrote for him.

He reminisced about evenings spent with Severinsen in Jim and Andy’s, a hangout near a New York recording studio.

“I was with Dizzy Gillespie and he was coming every night,” Schifrin said, referring to Severinsen. “He was already working with NBC, before Johnny Carson. He was in the NBC band as a trumpet player.”

Another friend, Mike Connors, had to cancel as narrator of “Lincoln Portrait” in the symphony’s second concert this season.

“Unfortunately for us--fortunately for him--he got a movie,” Schifrin said.

No worry. He got another friend to sub, Martin Landau of “Mission Impossible,” for which Schifrin wrote the catchy theme.

That reminded him of the time when he and Donna were newlyweds and threw their first party at their house on Hillcrest Drive.

The Landaus went to the same address on Foothill, three blocks away.

It happened to be the house of a movie producer. The help, accustomed to movie people, asked them in without question.

“So, they were saying, ‘How unusual! There is a party here and there is nobody,’ ” Schifrin said. “They waited. That is why they were so late.”

The list went on with a friend for every occasion.

Then Schifrin closed with an intimate expose of the creative process behind “Impressiones,” his trumpet concerto for Severinsen.

“He likes Spanish music,” the maestro said. “So he wanted something based on the Moorish, Gypsy, Spanish. I said, ‘I’ll do it on one condition, that we get the work premiered with the Glendale Symphony.’ And he said, ‘All right, deal.’ Now I have to write it.

“The score papers were facing me and I was facing the score papers, and nothing was happening.”

At last, inspiration came from his recollection of a Garcia Lorca poem he had read in college.

“I have the complete works of Garcia Lorca. And I found the poem and it is exactly what I needed.”

The poem tells of a dispute between a young poet, the river Darro and a church bell, all claiming to be the true voice of Granada.

“They are really having an argument,” he said.

“The river says, ‘I have been running my waters for centuries, timeless.’ The poet says, ‘No, but I understand the city best.’ The bell says, ‘No, you don’t know what you are talking about.’

“I mean, that’s not exactly the words of Garcia Lorca. It’s more poetic. But I’m trying to make it more interesting so you’ll get more excited during the concert. I want you to make bets. Who do you think is going to win?”

He called for a hand vote.

The answer will be given in Sunday’s program.

“I wrote a free translation,” he said, then added, “not as free as the one I did tonight.”

In private conversation over dinner earlier, Schifrin had predicted that the critics will pan the piece for being too melodic and romantic.

“They’ll call it reactionary,” he said. “I don’t care. I wrote it with conviction, passion.”

Whatever the critics say, Glendale can chalk up a world premiere by someone who holds his own in both Hollywood and Paris.

And you can bet it won’t be a bore.