Baton in Hand, Oue Works in Concert With Community

Ask most conductors what their role is and they’ll usually start telling you how they interpret a score. Not Eiji Oue, music director of the Minnesota Orchestra.

“The role of a conductor? To be an ambassador to the community,” Oue said in a recent phone interview from Minneapolis. “To be the bridge between Mozart, Beethoven and Bach and the community--and to bring audiences into the hall.”

Eiji Oue (pronounced AY-gee OH-way) is one of the new breed of conductors who are as dedicated to their communities as they are to the great works they conduct. Oue will bring his orchestra to the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Saturday.

Oue’s attitude, he said, “comes from my mother. From the age of 3, I accompanied her when she volunteered for school functions and went to nursing homes.

“I started piano when I was 4. Now I’m 39. Old. I loved it so much, I stayed with music.”

His parents were not musicians and gave Oue lessons “for the discipline of [my] sitting in one place for five minutes. But immediately I got hooked on the music. I kept playing and ended up conducting.”

Born in Hiroshima, Oue went at 15 to the Toho School of Music in Tokyo, where he studied conducting with Hideo Saito, teacher of Seiji Ozawa. Ozawa invited him to the Tanglewood Music Center in Boston as a summer student; there he met Leonard Bernstein. He went on to study at the New England Conservatory of Music and assisted Bernstein in, among other concert activities, creating the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.

Oue caught the attention of the Minnesota Orchestra after his phenomenal success leading the Erie Philharmonic in Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1995. There he had quadrupled both subscription sales and the annual budget through his outreach efforts. Recognizing a winner, the orchestra appointed him music director in 1995--a big step up for the young conductor, from a regional ensemble to a nationally known orchestra that’s more than 90 years old with a budget of $22 million.

There was nothing magic about his Pennsylvania success, Oue said.

“It was simple. I didn’t create a new idea or anything. I went to the community. I played piano for children and talked to them. I talked to students from my heart, about why I love music and why I became a musician.

“I went to nursing homes and shelters for the homeless. I communicated with people so that they learned the orchestra was not a creation they didn’t know anything about and the conductor was not from Mars. We’re just human beings. We just have music as our major goal. Shared with them what I know, what I enjoy most.”

Repeating the pattern in Minnesota, in his first year there, he conducted the orchestra in more than 50 concerts, led student groups and participated in other outreach efforts. Both the orchestra management, which says there’s been a marked improvement in fund-raising and ticket sales, and Oue, think the outreach is working again.

Oue is particularly dedicated to bringing in the next generation.

“I don’t expect to change their whole life. What I can change is their view of classical music. I can only show them that classical music can be fun.

“At one inner-city school, where there was a minority audience, after I played some Mozart and Beethoven, a sixth-grader said, ‘This is better than the music I heard on the radio.’ ”

The important thing, he said, “is to keep visiting. I go back to the same schools, 20 to 30 schools a year, ever year.”

Yes, he also sends members of the orchestra. “But I have to do more than anyone else,” he said. “I can’t be the one sending musicians and I’m sitting home doing nothing. I have to be more involved in the community than anyone else.”

The problem in Minnesota as elsewhere is economics. “Tickets are not cheap,” he said.

“So my first priority is to give people the best concert we can, then go out to the community. It’s a snowball effect. If the concert is not interesting, people will not come back. Snowball effect. So far this week, which is one of the coldest months here, we’ve sold out all four concerts.”

Of course, Oue does have opinions about interpreting a score. “I try to stick as much as possible to the composer’s intentions--his metronome markings, rhythms. Tchaikovsky, for instance, is very meticulous about his tempos and his ideas. The way I see the score is the way I conduct it.”

* Eiji Oue will conduct the Minnesota Orchestra in music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Dominick Argento on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Jean-Yves Thibaudet will be the piano soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. $10-$48. The concert is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society. (714) 553-2422.