A Classical Gas : Music: Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet uses elegance and style to make concert-going a colorful experience.

When Jean-Yves Thibaudet welcomes a visitor to his Upper West Side penthouse, on one of the first warm days after the winter that no one stops complaining about, he is wearing faded jeans, loafers without socks, a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, an expensive illuminated designer vest and a large stylish metallic crucifix. He is young, fit and looks like a million dollars. He could be a television or movie star.

None of that, of course, is supposed to matter in the mostly dowdy world of classical music. Thibaudet’s sartorial style should not tell you how the 32-year-old pianist from Lyons will play the Beethoven Second Piano Concerto tonight and Saturday with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In classical music, “style” usually means only the manner in which a piece of music is played, not the way the performer looks.

Style, however, is also that which we conventionally separate from substance. But music, being non-representational, so the New Harvard Dictionary of Music reminds us, is also nothing but style. Style, in other words, is content. And anyone who wants evidence might try focusing the laser beam anyplace along Thibaudet’s celebrated CD set of Ravel’s piano music on London Records. He is a pianist whose preference, in the French stylistic manner, is distinctly the music’s substance, each note cleanly articulated, textures made to seem as clear as spring water.

Thibaudet’s pianistic style is most often described as “elegant” in review after review (Albert Goldberg chose “exquisite” for Thibaudet’s Los Angeles debut a dozen years ago), and elegance happens to be something that Thibaudet feels not only can enhance the concert experience, but might just be a way to help make it more enticing to that new generation everyone in the business is desperate to attract.

“I think style is part of that,” Thibaudet says in his fluent English. “I think it does help. The concert experience is already such a stiff thing. You sit down at the piano, just by yourself, and everybody is supposed to be really quiet and listen to you. So I think you have to make it a little more appealing.

“I would never go in jeans. You have to respect the audience. Still, being really elegant and stylish is important, and you can find different ways to do it. It doesn’t have to be a white cummerbund with tails. I always have a nice vest with it or something different, just to give some color.”

Thibaudet’s craving for color and elegance, moreover, is something that seems to spill over into every aspect of his life and art, from his passion for Versace to his love of Brazilian popular music. In Japan, where he has had a large following for many years, he has modeled clothes on television commercials, which he called lots of fun. “I always loved clothes, whether causal or to get dressed up.”

That doesn’t make it that much fun, however, in most concert halls with their stiff performer dress code. “We have to have this white shirt, white tie,” Thibaudet complains. “I mean, it’s really boring.”

Indeed, to most in Thibaudet’s generation and younger, white tie and tails is the uniform of the service industry, of exclusive restaurant waiters and hotel porters. Thibaudet notes that tails are so outre these days that to get nice ones you have to have them made. “They’re not part of the collections anymore, because who’s going to buy them besides classical artists?”

This idea of not separating style from substance in music and dress has lasting implications for Thibaudet. Not only does he hope that by making the classical concert experience less frumpy, it might seem more appealing to a younger fashion-conscious audience, style, in his case, is also a meaningful symbol of a wide-ranging musical mind. For Thibaudet, that means everything from a love for opera and the human voice to an active interest in pop music.

Two highlights of his musical life, he says, exemplify this. One was touring with mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender this season in a program of Hugo Wolf songs (which he has also recorded). From Fassbaender, he says, he has learned “the things you don’t have on the piano, all about phrasing and legato and breathing. For me, it’s the best lesson, especially when you have to play a slow movement of Beethoven, and it’s just like someone singing. If you can’t think of it that way, I think you’re missing the whole point.”

The other is performing Messiaen’s massive “Turangalila,” which he has recorded with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly. It is representative of his interest in modern music, which he says is, like his taste in clothes, purely instinctive. When he hears something he likes, he plays it, whether it is music by Dutch modernist Peter Schat or American romantic Lowell Liebermann or even the new work for piano and orchestra by the young Italian post-minimalist Luca Francesconi, which he’ll be premiering soon in Amsterdam.

As in the the world of fashion, musical styles keep changing. If you like clothes, you tend to like all kinds of clothes, new styles, different styles. And Thibaudet offers the same philosophy to the classical music world as a method for survival in a pop-dominated culture.

“I think music is just music,” Thibaudet enthuses, pointing to his two revolving CD shelves of the latest pop releases on one side of his living room and a tall column of opera sets on the other. “If you like music you have to love all kinds of music. Which also should go the other way. All those young kids who love pop music should also like classical.”

* Jean-Yves Thibaudet performs tonight at 8 with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, (213) 622-7001, $29-$36; Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 556-2121 , $13-$35.