MUSIC / TIMOTHY MANGAN : O’Conor’s Field : Pianist, who performs tonight and Thursday with the Pacific Symphony, doesn’t want Irish composer’s works dismissed.

John Field, one of the first Romantic composers, invented the nocturne and influenced many who followed. But pianist John O’Conor--who will play with the Pacific Symphony tonight when its season begins in Costa Mesa--champions his fellow Irishman because “I think he is important in his own right.”

“I think it’s important that his music should not be disregarded purely because of the wonderful nocturnes that Chopin and other composers wrote,” O’Conor said last week from his home in Dublin.

“In the same way that you would not judge a Haydn sonata by the Beethoven Opus 111, and therefore look down your nose at it, I don’t think you should look down your nose at a Field nocturne because you’re looking at it from the viewpoint of what happened later.

“The nocturnes of Field have a tremendous simplicity about them. They’re not as harmonically advanced as those of Chopin. But at the same time, they have a purity and a simplicity of style that has a charm of its own.”

Virtually single-handedly, O’Conor has rescued Field’s music from obscurity, having recorded all seven of the composer’s piano concertos, 15 of the nocturnes and the complete sonatas.

“In his time,” O’Conor continued, “Field (1782-1837) was so incredibly famous. It’s funny that one of Chopin’s first letters home from Paris to his parents in Poland said: ‘You know, really, I’m doing terribly well here. My reputation is increasing all the time--they’re even beginning to compare me to John Field.’ ”

O’Conor is a soft-spoken man who reveals a disarming honesty and sincerity when it comes to his own particular strengths and weaknesses as a musician, and the repertoire that suits him. “I just don’t find I’m terribly interesting playing Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky,” he said.

“When you’re a student and you eventually get the technique where you discover you can play the Rachmaninoff concertos and the Tchaikovsky Concerto and that sort of thing, you get out and play them because it’s wonderful to revel in the fact that you can get around all the notes.

“But then I heard somebody play one of those concertos and I thought, ‘That’s so much better. I would never think of doing it that way.’

“I’m not a flashy, virtuoso pianist in that sense, and therefore I feel I have something special to say in a certain part of the repertoire, so I’ll stick to that.” Sticking to it has included turning down requests to record works that he feels don’t suit his musical personality.

In addition to Field’s music, O’Conor’s recordings include a nearly completed, enthusiastically received Beethoven sonata cycle for Telarc and a series of Mozart piano concertos with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Asked if he feels limited in this admittedly chosen territory, he replied: “I have to say there are other parts of the repertoire that I would like to explore, like the modern idioms. I like the Second Viennese School--Berg, Schoenberg, Webern. But trying to get anybody to allow you to program it is almost impossible. You submit two programs, they automatically choose the one that doesn’t have the Berg Sonata on it.

“I would like to play the MacDowell concertos. I think it’s disgraceful that they’ve been neglected. And I would like to play more of Mendelssohn’s piano music. People look down their noses at Mendelssohn, but some of his piano music is fantastic. People hardly ever play it.”

O’Conor, the first Irish pianist to win an international piano competition (the Beethoven Competition in Vienna in 1973), spent five years studying in Vienna, first with Dieter Weber and then with Wilhelm Kempff, with whom he made a close study of the Beethoven sonatas. Studying with Kempff was “fantastic, something extraordinary,” recalls O’Conor, and it clearly left a lasting stamp on the pianist, then in his 20s.

“He had an amazing sort of quality of revelation. He would suddenly say a word that would open up a whole new vista of possible interpretations for a passage that you had just never thought of before. He would say something (and) every time I play that sonata still, it will just come to me.”

Now 45, O’Conor is a veteran of complete Beethoven sonata cycles in New York, Boston, Dublin and London and believes, somewhat unusually, in playing the works in the order of their composition.

“I feel if you actually hear the cycle of Beethoven sonatas from beginning to end in chronological order, they make a fascinating legacy--and (you can realize) how far not just the man, but the music, piano playing and composition had advanced in less than 20 years. Music has not changed as radically in any 20 years, in any century, as much as it did in that time, from early Beethoven of the early classical style to the late Beethoven, where he opened the door for everything that has happened since.”

Tonight when O’Conor plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto, K.453, with the orchestra, attentive listeners will note his generous use of ornamentation, of which he has made a special study, not only in the piano music but in opera as well.

“It is very important,” he said, “to know the difference between the concertos which Mozart wrote for himself to play--in which a lot of the music is quite bare; there can be just one note in the bar where he would expect to fill in during performance--and concertos that he wrote for somebody else to play, where the writing is much more elaborate, everything is notated much more clearly.”

O’Conor preaches decorative restraint, however. “There is a version of ornamentation by this fellow in Frankfurt who had had one lesson with Mozart, and 30 years after Mozart died he produced ‘Ornamentation as I Studied with Mozart.’ And it’s absolutely disgraceful. I mean, he writes, you know, almost 44 notes for every one that Mozart wrote.

“I think ornamentation has to be done tastefully. I don’t think it should destroy the line of the melody but should in some sense ornament it without interrupting it.”

He is nothing but critical of his own musical education in Ireland, where he says “musty” scholarship was emphasized over performing skills. He satirized the typical assignment: “ ‘You must write an essay on what Lassus had for breakfast.’

“I was told I should stop practicing an instrument while I was doing my degree in music because it was important to get an honest degree.”

So he has set about changing things. He helped establish the GPA Dublin International Piano Competition and, just this year, the first performance degree program ever offered in Ireland (at Dublin City University) is underway thanks largely to his efforts.

He remembers a history lecture from his own school days. “The professor took out the book and started reading from Gustave Reese’s ‘Music in the Renaissance’ and I thought, ‘Hey, I can buy the book too and stay at home and read.’ I’m totally against that.

“I think the whole reason why people are fascinated by music is because it’s stimulating, it’s fascinating, it can be fun, it can be aggravating, it can be infuriating. And watching somebody read a book is just about as far away from that as I can think.”

* Pianist John O’Conor plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.17 in G, K.453, tonight and Thursday with the Pacific Symphony, conducted by Carl St. Clair, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Also on the program: Bernstein’s “Benediction” (with tenor Meir Finkelstein); and Mahler’s Symphony No.1 in D, “Titan.” Curtain: 8 p.m. $13 to $37. (714) 556-2787.