Acceptance Arrives Far From Home : Concert: Pascal Roge, who performs in Costa Mesa Sunday, says that French music doesn’t sound as good to the French.

It’s not easy promoting French music--especially in France. So says pianist Pascal Roge, who has found that when it comes to French music, his countrymen would usually rather hear something else.

Roge, who performs Sunday with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, describes an almost inbred attitude in the French against their own music.

“For instance, the music of Poulenc and Faure, which I play a lot of and have also recorded a lot, is more appreciated outside of France,” Roge says. “In France, before they listen to it, or before even they go to the concert, they see Poulenc’s name and say, “Oh, well, it’s not so interesting.’ . . . The French composers, apart from the big names like Ravel and Debussy, are neglected in France. So, I play more of it outside of France than in France.”

This prejudice begins in the schools, not least in the venerable Paris Conservatoire, where Roge enrolled at age 11. “When I was a student in the conservatory I learned almost everything but French music, apart from a few pieces by Ravel and Debussy. We were taught the classical repertoire and the basic piano music you have to learn when you are a student. I had never played a note of Poulenc before I was 30. And Satie is the same thing.”

Now 40 and considered a champion of the French repertoire in general, and of Poulenc in particular, Roge himself once thought “that the music wasn’t really worth looking at. Because you are influenced by what your teacher says and you find that you never see that music in any program or in any recordings and you say, ‘Well, it mustn’t be important.’ ” He first investigated Poulenc’s piano music when an English record company approached him about recording it. “(I) discovered such beautiful music that I immediately said yes.”

That recording won him a 1988 Gramophone Award and led to further acclaimed Poulenc recordings and upcoming plans to record the concertos with Charles Dutoit and a selection of the vast repertoire of songs. He says he’s ashamed of his former attitude toward the composer. But then he laughs and says, “I’ve done enough now” to make up for it.

A third-generation professional musician, Roge started lessons at 3 1/2 with his mother, an organist and piano teacher. “I learned the notes before the (alphabet). It’s easier--only seven notes. It was so natural for me that I never thought of it as exceptional. And my parents were very careful not to force me or anything; it was always a pleasure, and the only bad memories I’ve had was when my mother was teaching another student--because I couldn’t play.”

In this musical climate, he “just kept playing the piano, and playing the piano meant going to the conservatory, and going to the conservatory meant going into competitions, and so on.” At 20, he won the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud International Competition, a victory which, he flatly says, did nothing for him.

“The real important things in my career have been my encounter with Julius Katchen, an American pianist (who lived in Paris), whom I met when I was 15. And the second thing was my first recording when I was 17,” which Katchen helped bring about by recommending Roge to Decca, the company for which Katchen recorded. “The competition came . . . three years after my first recording, which is quite unusual.”

Of his three years as Katchen’s pupil he says: “I was very lucky because I met him at the right time, when I was still a student but when I had already a knowledge of the technical side of the instrument. In fact, he never mentioned any technical things to me because he said, ‘You already have too much technique.’ I think he meant that I was too obsessed by the technique. So he was the one who really brought me to the interpretation side, to (do more) thinking about the music.”

As he has matured as a pianist, Roge purposely has limited his repertoire--a work has to be “inside” you, “and inside there’s not much room for too many things,” though his repertoire is by no means all French.

“Ten years ago I had a much wider repertoire than now. A lot of concertos, for instance, I don’t play any more because I realized after having played them 20 times, I was bored and couldn’t find anything else” in them.

He estimates that he has performed Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, which he will play with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, more than 200 times, but he says he never tires of it.

“Every time is a new performance for me. It’s music where I feel completely free. Every time I play the second movement, I have tears in my eyes, I can’t believe that music is so beautiful. I cannot even think of being bored.”

The pianist now lives in Geneva and performs 80 to 90 concerts a year, which requires him to travel about nine months annually. Usually he is accompanied by his wife and by his two children when school permits.

Despite his strong feeling toward the music of his native country, Roge doesn’t believe that only a Frenchman can perform French music correctly--he cites Michelangeli, Zimerman and Gieseking as examples. But he does admit it is elusive for many: “French music is a matter of taste, a matter of feelings; it is not a technical thing. For me, French music is much more attached to paintings than to sound. You have to get first the vision of the music. I often say to people, ‘Go to a museum and look at the Impressionist paintings; try to understand what is the smell of France.’ It’s a matter of sound, but the sound is in your imagination--it is not in your fingers--and it has to be (in your imagination) before it’s in the keyboard.”

In fact, when it comes to music-making, Roge consistently emphasizes the importance of instincts and affinities--”either it works or it doesn’t”--over techniques, traditions and words.

“I remember one of the very first times I played with Pierre Dervaux, who was a great French conductor, and he was a very good accompanist and it was my first time playing the Beethoven First Piano Concerto, and I was going to say, ‘Well, here I do this, and here this.’ And he said, ‘I have ears.’ If a conductor starts asking you where you slow down, where do you go faster,” Roge says, smiling, “then I’m already suspicious.”

Christof Perick conducts the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony for 23 Solo Instruments; Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (with soloist Pascal Roge) and Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D “London” Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $9 to $26. A free concert preview will be offered at 2 p.m. Presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Information: (714) 553-2422.