Carl St. Clair Always Knows the Score : Music: The Pacific Symphony director tells a lecture audience that he digs deep into a work to understand not only the notes, but the composer’s soul.

Carl St. Clair, the new music director of the Pacific Symphony, established rapport instantly with his lecture audience at the Laguna Art Museum on Wednesday night, pulling a penny from his pocket and engaging his listeners in a game.

“Would you tell me what this is?” he asked, raising the coin so that all 25 or so in the room could see it.

Yes, it’s a penny; yes, it’s money; yes, it’s a unit of measure, said St. Clair, repeating the group’s responses. But he was after more abstract interpretations.

Whose face is on the coin, he wanted to know. What place is shown there? What political and religious meanings do the words “In God We Trust” convey?

The conductor puts himself through a similar exercise to prepare every piece, St. Clair said.

“I do what we’ve just done,” he said. “If I just say ‘that’s a quarter note followed by a 16th note,’ then that’s the obvious. One has to constantly look at the notes more deeply. They contain more.”

The ultimate achievement, he said, is to “feed your energy off of the inspiration felt by the composer when he wrote, to go deep into his psyche and soul.”

Delivering the second of three lectures in the California Contemporary Composers Series organized by the museum and the UC Irvine School of Fine Arts, St. Clair said that getting to know composers helps him find the more profound meanings in the simple black marks on plain white parchment.

St. Clair has worked with contemporary composers around the world. He recalled choosing William Kraft, who lives in Los Angeles, to write “Vintage 1990-91,” a fanfare featured in St. Clair’s first official concert as the Pacific Symphony’s music director last fall.

“I knew his ear, I knew his (musical and aesthetic) language and I knew him, so already there was a bond we had. . . . This relationship with a living, breathing person is the most exciting aspect of re-creating music.”

When a composer is not alive, St. Clair said that he will travel to his or her homeland to read about the composer’s life and the historical circumstances pertinent to each composition.

Maurice Ravel’s haunting “La Valse,” which the Pacific Symphony will perform next month, could be viewed superficially as a “charming souffl e ,” said St. Clair. But, he continued, a deeper analysis of the piece, which concludes with violent cacophony and a military drum beat, shows it to be “an absolute nightmarish bacchanal, and represents everything that happened to Austrian society at the end of World War II.”

“Music for Prague 1968,” another work on the orchestra’s April program, also embodies feelings toward war. St. Clair learned that directly from Karel Husa, the Czech who composed the piece. At the University of Michigan, where St. Clair taught conducting for eight years, he played trumpet in the work under Husa’s baton.

“In 1968, when Prague was invaded by the Soviet Union, Husa was immediately outraged” and wrote the piece quickly, St. Clair said. “He is the kindest, gentlest man, but there were moments when he conducted when his face was as red as that sweater. If you saw his face, you couldn’t help but understand (what) he felt for this city of Prague--which hadn’t been free for 1,000 years. This is absolute vengeance, anger and rage from a composer.”

* The California Contemporary Composers lecture series continues on May 15, when Lalo Schifrin will speak at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Information: (714) 494-6531.

* Carl St. Clair will conduct the Pacific Symphony in works by Mozart, Richard Strauss and Brahms on March 27 and 28, and in works by Ravel, Husa and Haydn on April 10 and 11, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Information: (714) 474-4233.