MUSIC : Boy Played, Then Man Composed Himself

Before he was a conductor, before he was a composer, Steven Mercurio, 36, was a rocker.

“Yeah, I played guitar in rock ‘n’ roll bands throughout high school,” says Mercurio, who will conduct Puccini’s “La Boheme” for Opera Pacific beginning Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“I think it’s good for kids to do that. I don’t think there’s any way for a 16- or a 17-year-old to understand what Beethoven is really about or what Puccini is really about.”

After next passing through a jazz-fusion phase, he found classical music. “I became more interested in works that were composed, “ he says, “that were built by genius and the idea of the love of the form, of harmony, of the gesture, of the timelessness of a great composition.”

So he decided to go to Boston University and then to the Juilliard School of Music to study composing. It was in New York that he also began to fall into his current profession.

“All the early conducting I did was conducting my own and other composers’ pieces,” he says, “which is healthy because you can’t indulge in conductoresque things that don’t function. With the composers there, they let you know right away what the point of their music is.”

After graduating from Juilliard, Mercurio worked as associate conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic with Lukas Foss from 1986 to 1989 and also as one of the 22 assistant conductors at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1987 to ’90.

He became principal conductor of the Opera Company of Philadelphia in 1991. In July, he was named music director of the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, which begins next summer.

That kind of busy schedule keeps his composing to a minimum. But when he does write, he doesn’t hesitate to think big and to think personal.

His “For Lost Loved Ones,” written in 1984, reaches back into the native New Yorker’s close-knit family--Italian on his father’s side, Jewish on his mother’s. He wrote the piece for his brother Paul, who, he says, “just disappeared about 15 years ago on Thanksgiving Day.

“He went to see some friends with the family junky car and was never heard from again,” Mercurio remembers. “It’s not as if he ran away. I’m talking about a 20-year-old, not about a little child. He had money in the bank, which he didn’t take. No clothes were taken. And the car was never found. It was a piece of junk. He just disappeared.”

The composer described the work, which received its premiere by the New York Philharmonic led by Zubin Mehta in 1991, as “programmatic, in the way that Strauss is programmatic.”

“It’s a 40-minute chunker, a monster. It’s gigantic. Winds in fours, eight horns, two harps, seven percussion. It’s my version of ‘Heldenleben.’ It’s exactly the same orchestration as ‘Heldenleben’ and ‘Zarathustra.’ It’s just this big, romantic chunker.”

About the same time, he says, both of his grandmothers, who were in their 80s, died of natural causes. “I missed them terribly. But I can’t remember it in negative terms. I can only smile when I think of my grandmothers, and so a lot of the piece is remembering in a positive way.”

In fact, he titled the finale “vincente, “ which in Italian means “winning.”

“It’s a victorious, life-affirming ending because I’m basically a life-affirming person,” he says. “Although my brother is gone, so much of who I am and my memories and what I will be are tied up with him. He lives, obviously, so much through me.”

Who: Steven Mercurio will conduct Puccini’s “La Boheme” for Opera Pacific.

When: Saturday, Sept. 12, at 7 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 13, at 2 p.m.; Wednesday, Sept. 16, and Sept. 18 and 19 at 8 p.m.; and Sept. 20 at 2 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive.

Wherewithal: $15 to $75.

Where to Call: (714) 979-7000.