Old-School Conductor Likes His Baroque Made Modern

Conductor Alexander Schneider is not afraid of controversy. Although he will open the San Diego Symphony’s new Classically Baroque series Thursday at Copley Symphony Hall, the 82-year-old Russian-American musician can hardly be described as a staunch advocate of Baroque music.

“This word Baroque --I don’t believe in this word,” Schneider said in a phone interview from his home in New York City. “In my opinion, Baroque doesn’t exist. There is only good music and bad music. In a sense, everything is Romantic (music), because it still has a heartbeat.”

Schneider’s Baroque feast in San Diego includes concertos by Vivaldi and Torelli, as well as J. S. Bach’s Suite No. 1 for Orchestra. And you can rest assured that the opinionated conductor is not preparing these works by studyingthe interpretations of various period-instrument orchestras that have recently flooded the compact disc market.

“Just last week I heard one of those orchestras play, and I think that it sounds horrible. They played a Beethoven symphony out of tune and badly. It’s silly to go back to old instruments. If you have good instruments, you should play them well. Suddenly, it has become a fashion to go back to old instruments.”

Schneider’s views sound decidedly old-school, which is entirely appropriate for a musician schooled in 19th-Century traditions. He studied violin in Germany after World War I and was concertmaster of the Frankfurt Symphony from 1925-33. He maintained his own string quartet--the Schneider Quartet--and later joined the Budapest Quartet, in which his brother also played. In 1938, he emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazi regime.

“I first visited this country in 1932 when I was playing with the Budapest String Quartet. I came back every year with the quartet and officially emigrated in 1938.”

Schneider is best known as a festival organizer and master teacher to young musicians. In 1950, with cellist Pablo Casals, he established the annual summer music festival in Prades, France, and was equally instrumental in setting up Casals’ festivals in Puerto Rico. Every Christmas vacation since 1969, Schneider’s New York String Orchestra Seminar draws talented young musicians for tutelage that ends in a Carnegie Hall concert under Schneider’s baton. As one of five American artists (including George Burns, Alvin Ailey, Myrna Loy and Roger Stevens), Schneider was feted in 1988 for his lifetime of musical enterprise at Washington’s Kennedy Center.

Schneider regularly accepts invitations to guest conduct orchestras, but he has never been music director of a symphony. He said he always turned down overtures to become a permanent music director.

“In the old times, when you were music director, you had responsibility for everything. That included the business end, which did not interest me. The longest amount of time I work with an orchestra is two weeks. I never conduct more than two weeks because after two weeks it’s all downhill with the musicians.”

Schneider’s active schedule of performing and teaching leaves him little time to indulge in nostalgia, but the pace of today’s music world bothers him.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have enough time to rehearse, to really get into the music. Playing is not relaxed any more, and we don’t phrase the way we used to.

“The pace of life goes faster and faster. I remember traveling from New York to Los Angeles in the 1930s--that was four days on the train. That gave me time to read books on the train. In those day we had time to read poetry and time to rehearse.”

Diva in the making. Soprano Celeste Tavera, national winner of the 1989 Liederkranz Foundation award, will perform a solo recital at 4 p.m. Sunday at St. James Episcopal Church in La Jolla. West Coast Lyric Opera, San Diego’s most consistent presenter of vocal recitals, is sponsoring Tavera, who performed last season in San Diego Opera’s “Die Zauberflote.” Tavera’s La Jolla program will include songs by Berlioz, Duparc and Schubert, as well as opera arias by Verdi and Puccini.

Pops pushes mayhem. “Hitchcock: Master of Mayhem” is the title of the San Diego Symphony Pops’ recently released recording. In this collection of motion picture and television theme music, the orchestra plays excerpts from several Hitchcock classics, including “Psycho,” “North by Northwest,” and “Rear Window.” This mayhem disc is the orchestra’s second recording under the direction of Lalo Schifrin. It was recorded this summer after Schifrin’s stint as guest conductor at Hospitality Point, the Summer Pops outdoor venue. The Pro Arte compact disc (or cassette) is available at the Copley Symphony Hall gift shop and local record outlets.