Musical Chairs No More? : Although Conductor Jorge Mester Wants to Stay With the Pasadena Symphony, He’s Also Looking for a ‘Regular Gig’

“I’m looking for steady employment,” says conductor Jorge Mester.

No way. Only a lifelong overachiever like Mester--whose name is inextricably bound up in the recent histories of the Juilliard School, the Aspen Festival, the Louisville Orchestra and, for the last 11 years, the Pasadena Symphony--can get away with joking about “steady employment.”

These days, the 59-year-old Mester reiterated, he actually is looking for “another regular gig,” where he can hang his baton, although he says he hopes the Pasadena job--which entails rehearsing and leading merely five subscription concerts a season--is permanent.

“As long as they’ll have me, I’ll be here,” says the former New Yorker, on the phone from Cologne where he is visiting his 6-year-old daughter, Amanda.

The latest and belated installment celebrating Mester’s 10th season takes place tonight in Civic Auditorium, when he leads the evening-long Seventh Symphony by Gustav Mahler.

Mester’s first decade in Pasadena has gone by quickly, the American conductor observes. And now, with the recent efforts of executive director Wayne Shilkret and the organization’s board of directors, “the orchestra’s future seems assured. We had to take care of that before getting to other issues of expansion and community service.” He refers to the organization’s recent financial shoring up, just one example being the substantial additions to its endowment.

During these same years, Mester has left his posts as head of conducting studies at the Juilliard School in New York City--he had been on the faculty for two tours of duty, the first beginning at his own graduation, in 1957--and as music director of the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado.

For more than a decade (1981-94), he was associated with the national orchestral network of Australia, the ABC. He gave his last concert in Australia in October, 1993, but, characteristically, has been invited back. He has also conducted opera in Australia.

Way back in history, 1946-52, Mester lived in Los Angeles, as a student at a military school in Hollywood. A native of Mexico City, he went from L.A. to New York to study at Juilliard. He was a violist then, but became a conducting protege of Jean Morel and later Morel’s associate on that faculty.

During his first stint at the Juilliard School, Mester was simultaneously making a reputation as a new-music specialist while he served as music director of the forward-looking Louisville Orchestra (1967-79). Indeed, in his long Kentucky tenure, he conducted more than 200 premieres--largely music by living American composers.

But, in fact, Mester is an old-fashioned generalist: He conducts all styles and periods.

Mahler, however, is one of his loves. Mester talks about the dichotomies in the large-scale Seventh, the intellectual “wrestling” he does every time he is faced with the arbitrariness of “three dark movements” followed by a finale of “dazzling brilliance, like coming out of a dark cave into blinding sunlight.”

The question for the conductor, Mester says, remains: “Is the finale actually the antithesis of what has come before, or is it their logical conclusion?”

The answer, he feels, “can sometimes be found in the moment of performance, when the balance goes one way or the other.”

Although Mester is no longer formally a member of any musical faculty, he says he still “loves teaching” and believes his approach to teaching conducting is different from any other.

In upcoming May workshops in Los Angeles (sponsored by the American Symphony Orchestra League--location to be announced), Mester will display his approach, which he describes as one dealing with “psychological issues and with the self-destructive behavior a conductor’s body can produce. I try to confront this physical dilemma.”

Perhaps Mester would like to write, as the late Erich Leinsdorf did, a volume on how a conductor prepares a performance?

“No, it wouldn’t be possible to write a book about what I teach when I teach conducting, because this is something each individual must work out, on the spot. Thinking doesn’t solve it.”