MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : A Grade Notion : Pianist Robert Thies Follows an Academic Path Toward His Career Goal

Twenty-three-year-old pianist Robert Thies is taking a cautious approach to building a career. He is staying in school, trying to make local contacts and venturing out only occasionally for concerts. One such occasion comes Sunday, when he’ll be the soloist in Beethoven’s Second Concerto with Ami Porat and the Mozart Camerata in Newport Beach.

“Certainly the college decision--which university or conservatory to attend--was a big issue,” Thies said in a recent phone interview from his Los Angeles apartment. “I chose L.A. and USC because I had already started making contacts.

“Secondly, while I was in school, I could try to look for work, studio work. There definitely was a practical side to it, as opposed to going to Eastman (School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.), where I was also accepted. My chances out here are a little better.”

Thies was born in Neptune, N.J., but moved periodically as his father, a planning consultant for Atlantic Richfield, was transferred to different job sites.

“Legend has it,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh, “that when I was 3 or 4 I was figuring out songs by ear on the piano. I don’t remember it. My mom decided to throw me into piano lessons when I was about 5.”

He started taking lessons when the family lived in Thousand Oaks, but he found it hard to stick with any one teacher as the family moved about. However, when the family moved back to California about 12 years ago, he began studying regularly with Robert Turner in Santa Monica.

“He laid a good foundation for me,” Thies said.

A professional career wasn’t always his intention.

“To be honest, I went through my giving-Mom-hell stage during my early teen years,” Thies said. “I had always loved music, but right about when I was 16, when it became something of a personal nature, I decided it was more than just a hobby or something I did while my friends were out playing soccer.”

It was studying two works--the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto and the Schumann Fantasia in C--that turned him around.

“Something about them grabbed me,” he said. “There was self-discovery there. They are big pieces and also make a big Romantic statement. I was taken by that.”

Things began falling into place during that time. “I made a trip to China in 1987 for a Chinese American organization,” he said. “It was listed as a 10-day musical tour of three cities: Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing. Everybody but myself was of Chinese American heritage. How I got to make it, I don’t know how. I was 16.”

The combination of music and travel was “quite a combination,” he said.

“That same year, I played with a smaller youth symphony orchestra. Even so, it was my first solo experience.” He played the First Movement of the Tchaikovsky First Concerto with the South East Youth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Larry Granger, who also led the Orange County-based South Coast Symphony until its demise in 1992.

“That was especially an inspiration.”

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About the same time, he also began an association with Mehli Mehta, conductor of the American Youth Symphony.

“When I was about 16,” Thies said, “he needed a pianist for the Saint-Saens ‘Organ’ Symphony, which was a great experience, too, playing inside an orchestra, getting piano-orchestra experience. It was great inspiration as well. I wanted to keep that up.

“Six years later, he was in a bind and needed a pianist immediately to put together a concerto very quickly--not in performance, in rehearsal. It was the Saint-Saens Second.

“Through that, he’s now recognized me as the official pianist with the American Youth Symphony, whenever they need a pianist to rehearse or even in performance when there’s a piano part in the orchestra.”

Thies has not yet played as a soloist with that orchestra, however.

In addition to his piano studies with Daniel Pollack at USC, Thies is taking classes in 20th-Century music and orchestration, for which he is writing a composition. “This is exciting because the USC Symphony will perform it. It’s yet another pressure I have on me.”

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Because it is short, he hasn’t named the work. “It’s more a sort of collage of various things, because I wanted to try different things. One part is almost minimalistic. Another part is inspired probably by Prokofiev or Shostakovich.

“They’re only giving us about three or four minutes, so it isn’t a big work by any means. The orchestra is going to read through it maybe twice. So it doesn’t have a formal structure.”

Thies played Beethoven’s Third Concerto with Porat and the Camerata last season.

“Technically, Beethoven’s Second Concerto is more difficult,” Thies said. “It’s certainly not the tragic Beethoven that I saw in the Third Concerto that I played with Ami last year. At the same time, it shows many faces of Beethoven.

“It’s not tragic, but the Second Movement is certainly one of his most tender compositions. It’s quite beautiful, and it offers a big contrast to just what preceded it and what is going to succeed it as well. There are completely different moods.”

The Concerto “almost looks back to Mozart,” he added. “But you have to make it not sound like Mozart, but like Beethoven.”

* Robert Thies will be soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Ami Porat and the Mozart Camerata on Sunday at 4 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 600 St. Andrews Road, Newport Beach. $14-$29 (student rush: $7). (714) 631-2233.