Meet a True Musical Preservationist : Richard Pontzious tired of seeing young musicians leave Asia. So he gave them a reason to stay.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people could defy ethnic and religious hatreds and rise above the divisions of politics and culture? If gender, wealth and social connections didn’t matter; only talent and civility? If optimism and friendship ruled, and if everyone pulled together creatively for the common good?

Such a utopia does exist, in the form of the Asian Youth Orchestra, and you can watch it in action Wednesday night at the Hollywood Bowl.

The 6-year-old Asian Youth Orchestra is completing its first U.S. tour after winning critical and popular acclaim in Europe and the Far East. It is the brainchild of Richard Pontzious, an American resident of Hong Kong, who each year brings together about 100 young musicians from throughout Asia for an intense month and a half of coaching, rehearsing and performing.

The players are all between 15 and 25, and each has had to audition in his home country. This year’s group of 94 represents the cream of about 2,000 hopefuls who tried out from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Korea and Vietnam.

The man who conceived the Asian Youth Orchestra is tall, trim, sandy-haired and driven. Pontzious, who started out as a music teacher in Asia, is the orchestra’s executive director.

“I still see myself as a teacher,” he said, sitting in an office at Hong Kong’s modern Academy of Performing Arts, the site of AYO’s “rehearsal camp” this year. In reality, though, he is the orchestra’s fund-raiser, audition organizer, tour impresario and father figure.

Pontzious, 51, was born in Utica, N.Y., but moved west with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area where he studied music at San Jose State University. His main instrument was violin, but he planned all along to teach rather than perform.

The first job he landed took him to Asia, conducting and teaching the Taipei American School Chorus in Taiwan. That is where his love affair with the Far East began. He also taught in Tokyo, where he got his first taste of creating an orchestra from the ground up when the Yamaha Music Co. asked him to form a youth symphonic band.

Even after he returned to the Bay Area in the early ‘80s, where he took over as music critic for the San Francisco Examiner, Pontzious maintained his ties to Asia, ultimately working on and off with students at China’s Shanghai Conservatory. Pontzious watched as many talented students went West to broaden their musical educations.

It seemed to him that the talent drain ought to be stopped “I concluded that going abroad wasn’t the real answer for young Asian musicians,” he said. “I began to think about what [could be done] for their growth right here in the region.”

It took three years of organiz ing to get the Asian Youth Orchestra off the ground. The first hurdle was securing high-level support. Pontzious succeeded in enlisting the sponsorship of Yehudi Menuhin--whom he collared when he interviewed him for the Examiner in 1987. Menuhin, hearing of Pontzious’ connections with Asia, mentioned his admiration for the Shanghai Quartet. That was all the opening Pontzious needed. Menuhin became the orchestra’s musical director, and its first conductor.

Next Pontzious set out to raise funds. The Asian Youth Orchestra is a nonprofit charitable trust and its funding is entirely private; Pontzious raises every penny himself. The budget this year, which supports auditions, world-class coaching in Hong Kong and travel, housing and food for the entire seven-week program, will top $2 million. Contributions have come in from the likes of Hong Kong communications baron Richard Li (who is underwriting the 1995 rehearsal camp) and Chinese movie idol Jackie Chan (who is funding a full scholarship for one musician).

Perhaps Pontzious’ most crucial task each year is overseeing the AYO talent search. In each of the participating countries, he has organized audition committees made up of senior faculty from top music schools. Tryouts are held in February and March, and although musicians must audition every year, it isn’t unusual for some to return for a second or third season with AYO.

No part of creating the orchestra has been simple. “I get my way,” Pontzious once said, “because . . . when somebody says no, I go next door. I don’t give up.”

Much of that persistence has been directed at overcoming political hurdles. “Korea was afraid their kids would become infected by politics,” he once told a reporter. “I had to fight half a dozen ministries in Singapore and Taiwan to get musicians out; only this year [1994] did China agree to supply musicians to play alongside Taiwanese musicians.”

One way to judge Pontzious’ success is to look at the company AYO keeps and the reviews it earns. As soloists, the group has attracted pianist Alicia de Larrocha, violinist Gidon Kremer and vocalist Elly Ameling. Its featured soloist in Los Angeles will be San Diego-born violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. Conductor Sergiu Comissiona, music director of the Vancouver Symphony and former leader of the Baltimore Symphony, toured with AYO in 1994 and agreed to become its first principal conductor starting this year.

During past tours in Asia and Europe, reviewers have noted that this is a student effort, but they’ve also used phrases like “unqualified success,” and more than one has said that the orchestra could hold its own with professional groups.

Perhaps more important to Pontzious are subtler achievements, signs that his goal of helping to expand the Asian musical community is being realized. He has been quietly asked whether AYO might be open to North Korean youth. And there is talk of auditioning in Laos and Cambodia. Indonesia is another possibility; AYO may perform there in 1996 as part of a tour that could take it to Australia.

But first, Pontzious has been concentrating on 1995. The orchestra, whose tour this year is part of the United Nations 50th-anniversary celebration, plays first in Asia (primarily in Japan) and in seven U.S. cities before arriving in Los Angeles. On the itinerary were performances at the White House and at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

This year’s AYO consists of 29 players from Japan, 28 from Taiwan, 11 from Hong Kong, five from the Philippines, six from Singapore, four each from Vietnam and Korea, three from Thailand and two each from Malaysia and China. The programs the orchestra is tackling include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Smaller configurations will also perform chamber works by Mozart, Vivaldi, Barber and Respighi.

As is the practice for AYO, the musicians received scores in late spring, but they had just two weeks of rehearsals in Hong Kong to become a functioning orchestra. English, spoken at various levels of fluency, was the common language. Rehearsals began at 9:30 a.m., and lasted seven hours a day, six days a week. Inside the rehearsal room, working with Comissiona or with separate instrument coaches, the players were all business, serious and totally attentive.

A way from their music stands, they seemed like kids everywhere, if a bit more polite. On the road and in Hong Kong, Pontzious and his staff expect the orchestra members to adhere to strict rules of conduct, or risk being sent home. No smoking, no drinking, no girls in boys’ rooms or vice versa, and mandatory daily showers. According to Pontzious, only one AYO member has ever been sent home for breaking the rules.

Like backs on a football team, they seemed to bond by position, or in this case, by instrument. The brass players stuck together, as did the woodwinds and the strings. Violinist Nguyen Quoc Truong, a slim, courteous 19-year-old from the Ho Chi Minh City conservatory, hung out with 22-year-old Luk Chau, a Shanghai native who now studies violin at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts. Luk sported with-it sneakers and a Dodger cap; Nguyen wore drabber garb. But Luk had taught him how to “high five,” and they were both vociferous in support of the “fact” that the string players were the best of this year’s AYO batch.

When the musicians weren’t talking music, they talked about where they came from and where the tour would take them. The Japanese players, for example, offered up descriptions of Tokyo, one of the concert stops before the AYO would travel to America; and the few players who had been to America told stories of shopping, hamburgers and pizza.

Food in general was a hot topic. “I know Los Angeles is a great center for arts and entertainments,” one double bass player said earnestly, “but just what is pastrami?”

They may not know much about what they’re going to eat when they get here, but there is one thing about touring the United States that the AYO members can perfectly anticipate. The final encore of their final performance, at the Bowl on Wednesday night, will be a rendition of Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations.

It won’t be under the baton of Maestro Comissiona. By AYO tradition, Richard Pontzious will conduct.

Hey, he’s entitled.

ASIAN YOUTH ORCHESTRA,Sergiu Comissiona, conductor; Anne Akiko Meyers, violin: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Date: Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. Prices: $3-$62. Phone: (213) 480-3232.