24 Seasons Later, He’s Still Full of Ideas for the Met : Music: While exploring musical connections, James Levine has made the orchestra a first-class outfit--as well as his family.

James Levine is effusive. He is effusive because that is the way he naturally is, a trait that makes him a favorite among singers and orchestra players but that can make cynics slightly leery.

He is also, on this occasion, effusive because he is talking about the Met Orchestra, which is what the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra now calls itself when it plays concerts, as it will under Levine at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in two different programs tonight and Thursday.

“I guess it represents something that is profoundly natural to me in every way,” Levine says, in an interview in his small but cozy office, of his remarkable loyalty to the Met, where he serves as artistic director. “I grew up in a time when the effects of long-term relationships between conductors and orchestras were very strongly felt and very strongly apparent.

“And therefore my 24 seasons at the Met remind me a bit of what the symphonic music directors of my youth did. They rehearsed repertoire. They performed it. Then they put it on the shelf a year or two and did something complementary, bringing the other pieces back. Gradually they built up a relationship not unlike that between a pianist and a singer or between the members of a string quartet--it’s just with more moving parts.”

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Most music lovers agree that Levine turned an inconsistent orchestra into one that nearly always demonstrates excellence. In reviewing the company’s new production of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande,” for instance, Times music critic Martin Bernheimer recently called the orchestra “now worthy of comparison with the best symphonic ensembles anywhere.”

So, it has been a particular pleasure of Levine’s that, beginning four years ago, he has been able to take the players out of the gloomy depths of the pit and put them in bright stage lights for three symphonic programs each year at Carnegie Hall, and he now tours and records with his orchestra each spring after the end of the opera season.

It really, moreover, is his orchestra. Earlier this season, at a performance of “Tosca,” which happens to be the first opera Levine conducted at the Met a quarter of a century ago, he said he looked around and saw only nine members of the orchestra who had been there at his debut. The orchestra is, at least from the way Levine talks about it, his family, which, for him, makes all the difference in the world.

“The big difference between this kind of music-making and a more ad-hoc kind,” he says, “has to do with how many levels of reflex you can build up to keep your consciousness free for other things, for things that have to do with how you express something. This is completely shot if you have to use your consciousness for technical matters or for communicating among yourselves.”

But comfortable as he may be with his orchestra, and even in his elder-statesman maturity, Levine, who will be 52 in June, still demonstrates a hint of defiance. In the clubby world of Met administration, he stands out in his polo shirt, blue cotton pants, desert boots and the trademark towel draped over his shoulder. Nor is it any longer evident that Levine automatically gets his way at the Met.

At a recent preview of Met Titles--projections of translations of opera librettos on audience seat-backs--Joseph Volpe, the Met’s blunt general manager, introduced a question-and-answer session by announcing that there is no power struggle between him and Levine, which led most people to believe that there surely must be one.

Realistically, Levine can’t remain at the Met forever. “I think we’re all pretty agreed that, since we’re planning until 2001, we aren’t going to change horses until that time,” Levine says. “But by the turn of the century, I don’t know. Will I start to feel I don’t have more to give here? Will they feel we really would like a change and now we see what we’d like to change to?”

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For now, though, Levine remains committed to further developing the Met Orchestra. For the first few seasons, he concentrated on programmatic works by opera composers, which is what he will conduct in Orange County (all Strauss tonight; splashy music by Stravinsky, Gershwin and Mussorgksy on Thursday). But he also thinks it essential that the orchestra regularly play new music. Elsewhere on the current tour he has programmed Gunther Schuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Of Reminiscences and Reflections.” He speaks about his love and passion for the music of Milton Babbitt and John Cage, and notes that hardly any other conductor performs both.

Furthermore, Levine notes that this desire to make musical connections, between past and present, between different cultures, or between all the arts, is increasingly his central artistic priority. That is the ultimate reason, he acknowledges, for remaining in the same administrative place for so long.

“You know,” he says, “when you are doing everything for the first time, you sort of say to yourself, ‘Well, hell, I’m doing it for the first time. I know I can’t get a hundred percent.’ So you release something that later on is very hard to release as the mountain becomes higher. Eventually you start to see more and more what the possibilities really are, and it gets to be very tantalizing to see how much of that you can get in any one performance. At least it tantalizes me.”

* The Met Orchestra , with James Levine conducting, performs tonight and Thursday at 8 p.m. at Segerstrom Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 556-2121. $20-$69.