PERFORMING ARTS : Son of a Well-Known Baton : When Paavo Jarvi decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, he got support from an unusual source.

Father-son rivalry has a long history in classical music. The best known case is the elder Strauss trying his best to prevent his son from becoming the future Waltz King. But conductor Paavo Jarvi has received nothing but encouragement from his father, the eminent Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi, in his decision to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“That question is always asked, possibly to get a juicy family drama,” Paavo Jarvi said recently from his home in New York. “I’m afraid that is not the case at all. Up to this day, he has shown real encouragement to me, and the same to my brother and to my sister”--who are also musicians.

His father has conducted in Los Angeles numerous times, including engagements at the Hollywood Bowl, but Jarvi the younger, 32, who has led virtually all the major Scandinavian orchestras, will be making his Bowl debut Tuesday with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He will conduct another program there Thursday.

Neeme was not the first person in the Jarvi family to take up the baton, however. That was Vallo, his brother, who served as a staff conductor at the Estonian State Opera in Tallinn for 50 years. “He was close to 80 when he died last year,” Paavo said.

Not surprisingly, “music was always in the house,” he recalled. “My father at that time was a director in opera and symphony, so I spent my entire childhood at rehearsals. I’ve seen ‘Traviata’ or ‘Boheme’--I’m not exaggerating--400, 500 times.”

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Jarvi began his musical studies with the piano, but he soon added percussion, violin and voice. His younger sister--now principal flutist in the Radio/TV Orquesta Sinfonica, Madrid--concentrated on the flute. His younger brother, who recently finished piano studies at the Manhattan School of Music, played keyboard.

“Mother is the only normal one,” Jarvi quipped. “We would play together all the time. We used always to be the [family] entertainment.”

Jarvi said he knew he wanted to be a conductor “from practically as far back as I can remember. But I didn’t know what conducting was. Somebody brought up in the family of a conductor will often see only one side of it, and that is the purely visual, physical side. The real work goes on in months of studying a score.”

Despite his father’s success in the former Soviet Union--he often conducted the Leningrad Symphony--the family decided to emigrate in 1980.

The reasons, Jarvi said, “are quite obvious: the complete lack of artistic and political and physical freedom. It sounds terribly poetic, but it is the truth.”

The authorities didn’t take the news well. “It was clearly communicated to us,” Jarvi recalled, “ ‘If you leave now, you will never come back.’

“Strangely enough, that made it a little bit easier for us to put down roots here. It was very dispiriting, but in the long run it helped us to really concentrate on the life here.”

In fact, he has been back to Estonia only once since it gained independence, although he is scheduled to conduct Mahler’s Sixth Symphony there next year.

The Jarvis thought they had learned something about Western values through Finnish television, which they could see in Estonia. But when they got here, they found America “shocking.”

“It was something we completely knew nothing about,” said Jarvi, who was 17 when the family emigrated. “Any information we did have was false--either exaggerated from the official press about how bad the life here is or from underground sources also exaggerating the positive side.

“A person is brought up in the Soviet Union with the understanding that you really don’t have much control over anything. Everything is state-owned. You are not the master of your fate, so to speak. We were terribly envious of people who could decide to try their luck in one way or another. We thought that was what the West was like.

“Obviously, the West is not quite like that. A person who comes here, expecting freedom for all, that everything is possible, that the only limitation is my brains and my willingness to work, gets disappointed. It’s not quite that way.”

Jarvi had studied conducting at the Tallinn School of music at home. He continued his studies at the Juilliard School in New York and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, from which he graduated.

He also spent the summers of 1983 and 1984 attending the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, but he did not conduct any public concerts. He did meet Leonard Bernstein there in 1983, however, and Bernstein’s impact was long lasting.

“The basic, global influence on me came from my father,” Jarvi said. “That is the strongest influence, without any doubt. In terms of later years, strangely enough, it was Bernstein, with whom I did not have much contact other than a brief encounter, that up to this day has influenced me.”

How? “It was that total commitment to trying to find every possible aspect of the music--and not necessarily only through the score, but through everything around you, though literature and everything. This is not to imply I hadn’t met people before with commitment, but there was something really magnetic about this person.”

Like Bernstein, Jarvi isn’t shy about his eclectic approach to a piece of music. “A score is not a literal document that has to be mechanically followed,” he said. “So much of it--most of it--is between the lines, implied.

“For example, in Viennese waltzes, nobody notates that the second beat should be a little bit late. A lot of things are implied. You have to know the score and history of the composer and circumstances of the piece being written and its performance history. So it’s not really possible or necessary to be too literal about things.”

That attitude has only been reinforced, he said, by working with contemporary composers, whose works, particularly of Estonian composers such as Arvo Part, he has championed in Europe. But his two Bowl programs--which include works by Prokofiev, Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Brahms--are far from contemporary. Jarvi, in fact, described them as “just warhorses.”

“That is the nature of [the Bowl.] If I would do any programs like this in Scandinavia, I would literally be fired. In Europe, that kind of program would just not get any kind of audience. They would not find it mentally satisfying.”

It is not that American audiences are behind their European counterparts, Jarvi said. “The problem is that the powers who generally influence programming in this country, they think that the audiences are behind. But audiences are much smarter than they want to think.

“It’s very important that I not be misunderstood. Every time I come back to America, I realize how dangerous is the point we are standing at right now. We are standing at the turning point of American cultural history in this battle about cultural funding. It just might be that Hollywood Bowl-type of programming will be the only form of serious music 20 years from now. That’s an exaggeration, but one should look at the worst possibility.

“In Europe, culture is not one of the extras, like in this country. Culture is part of the vital being. Here it is a dessert we could have after a meal, but we also could skip it. I’m saying this as an American citizen and a musician who is concerned. It’s not like a European coming here and criticizing the American system.”

PAAVO JARVI, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic,at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Dates: Tuesday and Thursday, 8:30 p.m. Prices: $1-$72. Phone: (213) 480-3232.