MUSIC : A Long Road to the Pacific : In his new post with Pacific Symphony, conductor Carl St. Clair draws from his youth in Texas

Carl St. Clair, the new music director of the Pacific Symphony, can drop some heavyweight names.

New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur, Boston Symphony music director Seiji Ozawa--these are people St. Clair says he can “pick up the phone at any time (and) have a question answered or talk with them about this or that.”

But there are other names he’ll mention, nowhere near as familiar, that can tell you a lot more about this 38-year-old Texan.

Take Robert S. Pool, for instance. Or Donn Laurence Mills.

Who?

Pool gave St. Clair a job in the governor’s office when he was in college.

“He hired me because I had blisters on my hands,” St. Clair recalls. “He looked at my hands and said, ‘What’s wrong with your hands?’

“I said I had blisters from building a fence, digging post holes and things like that. And he told me, ‘That’s why I hired you. Anybody who could work that hard and do this kind of labor certainly could work in the governor’s correspondence room. . . .’

“Mr. Pool always helped me when I was a starving student at the University of Texas. He helped me, and all he ever asked was that when I had the opportunity, I would help somebody else.

“And I remember that, and I try to live that because he lost nothing by helping me, but I gained everything. I always feel that if I can help other people, I only gain from that.”

Then there’s Mills, chairman of the music department at Chapman College in Orange and founding director of the fledgling Capistrano Valley Symphony who died of meningitis in February.

Mills had conducted the Texas All-State Orchestra in which St. Clair, then a 17-year-old from the tiny farm community of Hocheim, Tex., played trumpet.

It was not only the first orchestra St. Clair ever played in. “It was the first orchestra I ever heard,” St. Clair told The Times in January, when he came to guest-conduct the Pacific as one of eight who were trying out for the music director’s slot.

“I often wanted to tell (Mills) how important that was to me,” St. Clair said at the time. Last month he said he had been happy to learn that the remark got back to Mills before his death. St. Clair said he returns to conduct the All-State Orchestra “whenever they ask.”

He was the youngest of the eight announced candidates, and his appointment ended a search that began in February, 1988, when founding music director Keith Clark resigned after a bitter power struggle with the orchestra’s board of directors.

Another candidate, Lawrence Foster, claimed to have been the front-runner and said the Pacific had offered him the job in December but withdrew the offer after talks broke down over salary, rehearsal demands and residency requirements. The orchestra management has refused to comment on Foster’s claims.

St. Clair has declined comment on the Clark and Foster episodes.

St. Clair’s guest-conducting stint began under particularly trying circumstances, as he faced last-minute changes in program and soloist. Only days before the concert, soprano Benita Valente was engaged to replace Jill Gomez, a British soprano who could not enter the country because she lacked a visa. (Gomez and her British agent later would fault the Pacific management for the problem. The management would blame her American agent and the heavy workload at the Los Angeles immigration office.)

At any rate, St. Clair had to make some fast adjustments.

Gomez was to have sung selections from Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne” and “Dove sono” from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” Instead, Valente chose to sing Mozart’s “Exsultate, Jubilate” and three of Mahler’s “Ruckert-Lieder”--none of which St. Clair had prepared.

There was yet another surprise waiting for him: St. Clair had expected to conduct the Overture to Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote.” But when he got on the podium to start the rehearsal, he found the score for “Figaro,” the result of some apparent miscommunication between his agent and the orchestra.

“Maestro,” one of the musicians ventured hesitantly, “we have the ‘Figaro’ Overture. . . .”

St. Clair reportedly responded: “Even though I’m upset, that doesn’t mean you can’t call me Carl.”

Several musicians cite that response as part of what most impressed them about the candidate. As it turned out, St. Clair would conduct both the Overture and the Ruckert songs from memory.

He continues to insist that the musicians call him by his first name.

Louis G. Spisto, executive director of the orchestra, cites “two very keen ingredients” why St. Clair was picked as the new director.

“First of all, he’s an incredibly talented musician,” Spisto said. “In addition to that, he is a master at communication--on the podium, at concerts and in the rehearsal periods. He can get our orchestra to do more than just about anyone we’ve ever seen . . .

“He knows how to work with people and how to make everyone love working real hard. He’s going to demand excellence, and he’s going to get excellence.”

It was a long but steady road from southwestern Texas to Boston, where until this summer St. Clair was one of two assistant conductors of the Boston Symphony--and from playing first trumpet in a high school band to sharing the prestigious, $150,000 1990 Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award with Florida Symphony music director Kenneth Jean.

Past winners have included Kent Nagano, music director of the Berkeley Symphony and L’Opera de Lyon, and Hugh Wolff, music director of the New Jersey Symphony and principal conductor of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. In 1988, the award was shared by three conductors: Catherine Comet, music director of the Grand Rapids Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra; Jahja Ling, music director of the Florida Orchestra in Tampa and resident conductor of the Cleveland Symphony, and Neal Stulberg, music director of the New Mexico Symphony.

St. Clair studied conducting with Walter Ducloux at the University of Texas at Austin and taught music from 1976-78 at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville then moved to the University of Michigan to teach conducting for eight years.

In 1985, he became a conducting fellow at Tanglewood, Mass., the summer home of the Boston Symphony, and the following January he became one of the orchestra’s assistants.

In the summer of 1989, he toured with the late conductor Leonard Bernstein and conducted various orchestras in East Berlin, Leningrad, Milan, Paris and Rome, among other cities. This past August, he stepped in to take over for an ailing Bernstein at Tanglewood, and led his 1988 song cycle, “Arias and Barcarolles.”

“It’s very difficult for me to comment on the death of Mr. Bernstein right now,” St. Clair said Monday. “All I know right now is that, as soon as I heard the news, I felt a great emptiness and a great void. When we woke up this morning, for everybody, there was a great person missing from us.”

St. Clair has a three-year contract with the Pacific and will lead six pairs of classical concerts each season at the Performing Arts Center and two concerts each summer season at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

He holds two other positions as music director--of the Ann Arbor (Mich.) Symphony and the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra of Ithaca, N.Y.--one of which he must drop because of his contractual obligations to the Pacific. He says he has not yet decided which will go.

St. Clair’s goal, he said, is to make the Pacific “a nationally ranked, nationally recognized orchestra, which provides an extremely high artistic level of excellence.”

What he sees as the next step toward that goal is the development of “an orchestral sound, ensemble, intonation and energy.

“The most important thing,” he said, “is the musical sound of the orchestra, to have the same concept of sound so that we’re all working towards a tone quality and an orchestral discipline which is united and similar.”

The notoriety gained from the Seaver award likely has attracted the attention of other orchestras, but St. Clair--in his first week on the job--maintains he is only concerned with the matter at hand.

“I never think in terms of what something does for my career, but only of the music,” he said. “We have an orchestra that is certainly capable of making music at the highest level. That’s why I’m here. If you think too much about your career, you get off on the wrong tangent.”

St. Clair has not made radical departures in programming for the new season. “We began our season with a short contemporary work (William Kraft’s “Vintage 1990-91,” commissioned by the orchestra to celebrate St. Clair’s inaugural season). But the most important thing is a well-balanced diet of musical styles. I hope to be able to walk that line of balance carefully so as to allow the orchestra to perform standard repertory and to introduce new works--but in the proper balance.”

He has, however, experimented in rearranging traditional order.

“I find it’s very boring to have an overture, a concerto and symphony; overture, concerto, symphony,” he said. “ Standard , I think, is a dangerous word when it involves an art form which is always changing.

“I’m trying to make each program a little different so that every time that someone comes to the hall, it’s not, ‘If I’m five minutes late, I’m going to miss the overture.’ You might miss a whole Mozart symphony if you miss the first piece.”

Recent local press stories have chronicled his arrival in Orange County--buying a townhouse in Turtle Rock, purchasing furniture --in almost painful detail. St. Clair said he hasn’t read them. And while he doesn’t “avoid press,” he added that “most of the time,” he doesn’t read reviews.

“If the performance is good or not good, I’m usually the first one who knows that,” he said. “If (a critic) doesn’t or does agree, then that’s (his or her) job. It’s not my job. My job is to know whether I did a credible job or knew my music, knew the music as well as I could and conducted it as well as I could. . . .

“But I’m always listening to things. If someone says this or that, I’m always aware, and I would think through it. Learning is important to me. I’m not beyond learning.”

He is particularly looking forward to learning with the Pacific.

“I need to develop a musical relationship with the musicians of this orchestra,” he said. “And that’s about to happen. It takes time. It has to happen as it happens. It’s like a relationship with a person, place. This just happens to be a group of people.

“But through music we will find one another, and that will begin to be the relationship which will help us take future steps. The first thing is to meet one another in the music. That’s always a tremendous thing. It creates tremendous emotion.”