MUSIC : Hege Feels Comfortable Taking the Lead : New assistant conductor of the Pacific Symphony will have a taxing schedule but thinks he’s in a perfect spot.

When Daniel Hege, newly appointed assistant conductor of the Pacific Symphony, wanted to learn to play the oboe in college, he didn’t fool around with scales. He started with a concerto.

“I wanted to learn very quickly,” Hege, 25, said in a recent interview at a local deli. “I’d practice four hours a day, and I got pretty good. It’s very difficult to get a good sound on the oboe. But if you have a sound in your mind, you can very quickly adjust.”

Hege is becoming an expert in quick adjustments, what with multiple responsibilities that also include conducting the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra of Los Angeles, serving as instrumental music director of the Orange County High School of the Arts in Los Alamitos and leading the South Coast Symphony Youth Orchestra.

Hege replaces Lucas Richman, who left the post after a three-year stint. He holds a one-year appointment and will conduct the orchestra publicly for the first time Dec. 12 in a free program for the Latino community.

“It’s going to be a very taxing year, understandably,” Hege said. “But I really think I can do it.”

Hege was born in Denver and moved with his family to Idaho when he was 10. His father, a high school social sciences teacher, and his mother, a ballet lover, supported his music studies, starting him on the piano when he was in sixth grade.

“My dad wanted me to listen to vocal quartets--mostly gospel, some classical--because he wanted me to develop a sense of pitch,” Hege said. “I wanted to sing all four parts.”

When an operation on his ankle benched him from sports that year, he began spending as much time as he could at the piano. Time he spent listening to Glenn Gould’s legendary first recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” he said, “turned me around. I’d try to copy that aria and sing it and some of the other variations.”

Even though he loved music, however, “I wasn’t positive I wanted to be a professional artist and live like I thought an artist had to live,” he said. So he studied history in college in Kansas but switched to his present career in graduate school at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, even though his initial experience, he said, was traumatic.

“The first time I ever stood in front of a (student) orchestra was (to lead) Bartok’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra,’ ” he said. “I could barely read a score. I sat with that thing in my lap. I was so scared. That was a very fast induction into the world of conducting orchestral music.”

Still, he found conducting “far more exciting” than playing an instrument. “I think my personality is one of leadership and inspiration. I feel very natural on the podium.”

During his third year of graduate studies, he sent a videotape of his conducting to the Young Musicians Foundation and was invited to audition for a three-year appointment. He remembers the exact date of the audition: May 12, 1990, “a Saturday.”

“I had to pay my own way” to Los Angeles, he said. “It was a big risk to spend this amount of money. . . . They gave me two weeks’ notice,” he said. He had to prepare Beethoven’s First Symphony, Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” (both fairly standard works for conducting students) and the not-so-standard Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat.”

Stravinsky’s work is “very, very tough,” Hege said. “I spent many hours on the piano, running those rhythms, singing the notes. When I got (to the audition), I was very prepared and felt very at ease.”

Even so, they gave him no time to warm up with the orchestra. “They wanted to see how well I could do without talking to them,” he said. “What if you had to go in and do a concert as assistant conductor on a minute’s notice and you didn’t have a chance to tell them what you wanted? It’s just you, and you don’t have time to explain what you want.”

For the Pacific, Hege had five days’ notice to prepare Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the Overture to Rossini’s “La Gazza Ladra.” He had a 25-minute audition with the orchestra, and beforehand music director Carl St. Clair told him “to have fun, which is something I really believe in,” he said.

“Of course, you have to be serious--it’s a different kind of fun. (But) I did have a blast.”

Hege didn’t hear from the Pacific until July, and meanwhile he had accepted offers from the Orange County High School of the Arts and the South Coast Youth Symphony.

“I couldn’t turn down the Pacific; it was too important,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s just look at a calendar and see how it works out.’ Amazingly, there were only a few conflicts, and we were able to work those out.”

As assistant conductor, Hege will lead family concerts and in-school education programs, as well as free concerts for the Latino community.

“Doing the children’s concerts can only be good for me,” he said, although he added that as a conducting student he studied “things of huge scope because you study huge forms and how the geniuses work. You’re not studying (Rimsky-Korsakov’s) ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ which the kids would enjoy. But a lot of that stuff is great. It’s just not the meat-and-potatoes” of the repertory.

Still, he expects to have “plenty of time to study those (big) works” with St. Clair and to conduct them with the YMF and the Youth Symphony. “I will have plenty to do, and I think it will be good for me. I think I’m in a perfect spot.”

At this early stage of his career, Hege still takes time to give credit to his teachers, and one of them he singles out: Christopher Wilkins, a former assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra,

“I studied the Brahms’ Fourth Symphony with him,” among other works, Hege said. “Beforehand he told me, ‘Be sure you really know the score,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, I know the score.’ But I found out. The first thing he did was close the score and ask, ‘What’s the instrumentation?’ ”

Hege drew a blank.

“ ‘What is the oboe doing in the 10th bar?’ ”

Blank.

“I had studied this work,” Hege said. “I had given a lecture on it in an analysis class. I knew how that piece was constructed inside and out, every little phrase. But I didn’t even know some of the nuts and bolts that I should know as a conductor. He caught me.

“This guy was 29, and he said, ‘I haven’t looked at this symphony in over a year and I know those things.’ His expectation level for me was so high. I only had a couple of lessons with him, but he made me really focus and learn a score.”