O.C. MUSIC : Trading Investments for the Baton : Ex-Banker Richard Westerfield Will Lead Pacific Symphony in ‘Messiah’

Richard Westerfield has bartered cigarettes for chickens in Romania and has worked at a major investment banking firm in New York, helping Latin American countries gain access to capital. Not your average background for a conductor.

Born in New York City in 1957, Westerfield--who will conduct the Pacific Symphony in Handel’s “Messiah” in Costa Mesa on Saturday--grew up in a family that had little interest in serious music. But he did, and he pursued it. The turning point in his life came when he was 17: He was singing the Celebrant in his high school’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, and since it was the first non-professional production of the work, the conductor came.

“I met Lenny then,” Westerfield recalled on the phone recently. “I really got turned on to conducting.” A formal student-teacher relationship didn’t develop until years later--1985--when Westerfield spent a summer in Tanglewood, Mass., at the invitation of Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa, who had noticed him at a conducting competition in Tokyo. At Tanglewood, Westerfield renewed his acquaintance with Bernstein and met Carl St.Clair, the future music director of the Pacific Symphony.

In the meantime, his degrees and honors were mounting. He won a Fulbright to work with Mircea Cristescu at the Bucharest Philharmonic. (“It was easy to get a Fulbright” to go there, Westerfield says. “No one wants to go to Romania.”)

Just before going abroad, he met his future wife, Helen, who was studying German before leaving for Stuttgart to study choral conducting with Hemuth Rilling. Westerfield “signed up for the same program and spent the summer in Stuttgart. Then I went up to Bucharest. We met whenever we could in Vienna. I took the Orient Express.

“It sounds romantic but the train is overrated. . . . There was no toilet paper, for instance, and no heat.”

He spent two years in Bucharest, getting “great freedom to have to fend for myself.” That’s where he learned to trade cigarettes for chickens. “I would wait in block-long lines (to buy food) and there would be nothing. It was completely impossible. But being a Fulbright scholar, I had access to the diplomat store. I could buy cigarettes and soap there, and trade those for a chicken in a bag. It would still have its feathers.

“The Romanians never believed I was a conductor anyway,” he added. “They thought I was a spy. I was followed; my room was miked. I would always go to a park to talk about things. But I felt such a feeling of privilege when a Romanian family invited me into their home. We would talk. They had nothing--no concept of a supermarket, of being free and speaking your mind.”

When he got back to the States, he found “no one willing to offer me a conducting job with Romanian credentials. So I went back to Yale to study with Otto Werner Mueller, the best conducting teacher in the country. He basically tore me apart.”

Mueller was very strict. “You had to do it just this way,” Westerfield said. “His real strengths were in analyzing the score. He had a great understanding of form, of classical architecture. No question but that I learned so much from him. But the notion that there is only one way to go with any one musical phrase--it’s almost a crushing kind of dogmatism.”

So Westerfield ricocheted between “Bernstein and Seiji in the summertime and Otto Werner Mueller in the fall.” He took a job at Brown University, teaching and conducting the university orchestra. “But I just wasn’t growing. The most important thing for any artist is to be fresh, to have new ideas.

“Then I don’t know what happened to me. My first child, Stephen, was born. I turned 30. I thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll take a break from this.’ I applied to Dartmouth (School of Business Administration) and got a scholarship.”

With a Masters of Business Administration degree, he went to work for J.P. Morgan and Co. on the very day his daughter Joanna was born. He stayed at the investment banking firm from 1990 until 1993. “I always had this weird ability with numbers. I think it’s something that helps me do music. I have a photographic memory, I conduct from memory. At J.P. Morgan I could analyze things well. I could do the work and didn’t have to pretend.

“I would study my Mahler symphonies on the plane. People would poke fun at me. But a lot of people there can do weird things. It was really stimulating to be around people like that. It put hair on my chest, professionally. I learned to be responsible.”

And the company was extremely accommodating. “They let me take leaves of absence to go conduct. But after a while, as I started to have more responsibility, I couldn’t just waltz off and conduct. At about that time, I got this break with the New York Philharmonic, and the cat was out of the bag.”

Erich Leinsdorf had to bow out of a concert because of a back injury. As a cover conductor for the orchestra, Westerfield had been sitting through several rehearsals and was ready to take over the remaining ones. Someone else could have been called in for the actual concert, but the orchestra committee went to management and expressed its confidence in Westerfield.

“That was so affirming to me,” he remembers. “My nerves were gone. I felt great.” He conducted Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben,” Weber’s “Preciosa” Overture and Britten’s Nocturne. And then--just like in the movies--his phone started ringing, right?

“Well, I wish! But in the classical music world, orchestras are booked well in advance. So kind of nothing happened, at first. But it did get a lot of press. A lot of TV networks called. There were these stories about this banker at the Philharmonic. That was kind of fun.”

He continues to work as one of the Philharmonic’s cover conductors and guest conducts in the United States and Europe. “It can be very frustrating,” he said. “By the time the concerts are over, you’ve finally proved yourself to the orchestra and they have proved themselves to you. Then it’s on to the next place. But it’s good experience, and every orchestra is different and really fun.”

* Richard Westerfield will conduct the Pacific Symphony and the Pacific Chorale in Handel’s “Messiah” Saturday at 3:30 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Soloists will include soprano Andrea Matthews, mezzo-soprano Melissa Thorburn, tenor Stanley Cornett and bass William Parcher. $15 to $35. (714) 556-2787.