A Real Grabber

Alone on the podium, conductor Jung-Ho Pak stands with arms folded across his chest, his face expressionless except for a watchfulness in his eyes. The orchestra slowly assembles for rehearsal around him, the violinists pressing resin to bows, the oboists tinkering with reeds, the trumpeters filling the room with the wide arc of their arpeggio warm-ups.

Pak, wearing wire-rim glasses, a tomato-red button-down shirt and khakis without a belt, looks no older than his charges in the USC Symphony, but he’s actually 35.

The rehearsal begins promptly--2 1/2 hours of minutely detailed work on Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony, which is taken apart and put back together like a fine Swiss watch.

Pak is a compelling, encouraging leader. While barking instructions to his players over sweeping surges of music, he also dishes out compliments. He admires some particularly “macho” flute playing; calls out, “That’s beautiful, Brad” to the timpanist; and then stops and beams: “I do like the trumpet. What a great idea! Just to lengthen the last note just a hair.”

Pak urges the players to solve their own problems with intonation, phrasing and ensemble by listening to and watching each other, not him. (“Eye contact makes my day.”) The goal is to create a chamber music atmosphere on an orchestral scale, to motivate all of the players, from first violinist to last, to participate in the music. (“I always conduct the back stands. You matter the most to me.”)

A conductor’s job, says Pak, is not performing but “grabbing” attention. “And anything less than grabbing,” he says, “is a failure.” Call it his motto.

As the newly appointed music director of the USC Symphony (and head of the university’s conducting program), and also as the all-but-formally-announced music director of the all-but-resurrected San Diego Symphony, he’s got a couple of influential stages from which to shape the Southland’s classical music future.

At USC, Pak takes over after the 25-year reign of Daniel Lewis, who brought the orchestra and conducting program--where Pak himself was a student--to national prominence. His challenge there will be not to drop the ball, to continue to attract the best musicians and turn them into his sort of passionate professionals. (He’ll be abetted by guest conductors Sergiu Comissiona and the Pacific Symphony’s Carl St.Clair, who will lead a concert each and give master classes.) His first public outing with the USC ensemble is this Friday.

In San Diego, where Pak previously served as associate conductor, he has to lead a beleaguered orchestra out of a bankruptcy that forced the cancellation of its season last year. With reorganization on the horizon--concerts could get underway by the first of the year, says MaryAnne Pintar, a spokeswoman for the symphony task force in the mayor’s office--Pak must find a way to make symphonic music work in a city notoriously lackadaisical about the art.

“You can blame the weather because it’s so gorgeous there,” says Pak, sitting in his as-yet-undecorated office at USC and talking of San Diego, where he lives with his wife of four months. “You can blame that we have two great sports teams, the Chargers and the Padres. People say, oh, it’s a Navy town, it’s very provincial, there’s no money and there’s no appreciation for the arts there.”

But he ends up dismissing every one of those excuses.

“The question is, did the San Diego Symphony provide for the community’s needs? I think, fundamentally, no it didn’t.”

Born in Burlingame, south of San Francisco to Korean-American parents, Pak was encouraged early in music. His first conducting experience came in junior high when he stepped out of the clarinet section to fill in for an absent band teacher. He went on to study clarinet and music theory at UC Santa Cruz and, as a graduate student, conducting at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and USC.

Since then, he has been the music director of various training ensembles, including the local YMF Debut Orchestra, and has taught at the Colburn School of Performing Arts and in the UC system. He is in his sixth year as principal conductor of the Disney Young Musicians Symphony and also currently holds conducting posts with the Diablo Ballet in Walnut Creek, the Spokane Symphony and the San Francisco Conservatory. Guest conducting has taken him to the Seattle Symphony, the Seoul Philharmonic and the L.A. Chamber Orchestra.

As a student, Pak became convinced of the importance of music theory and analysis to performance, something he instills in his students today.

“Everyone has that experience of Saul going to Damascus,” he says. “For me, it was listening to [Dutch cellist] Anner Bylsma play Bach’s Cello Suites, and hearing the Prelude to the First Suite in particular. I didn’t understand why this music-making touched me so, and why it was so direct. And now I understand it was because it was so harmonically aware--it was so built. He was using the harmony and the structure, finding the emotionality within that dry material of theory.

“From then on it became a quest for me, to shake students out of their complacency and say, theory is not a dry thing, it’s alive and puts the flesh on the bones we discover.”

With his conducting students, the quest takes an unusual turn. “The first thing we do is analyze everything in a score harmonically, structurally, motivically.”

Then the students are called upon to defend the piece, as if they were the composer. “I’ll say, ‘You, why did you do write this,’ even though it’s by Beethoven. Because if you can’t defend a piece, the conducting will be hollow.”

But Pak’s theoretical bent doesn’t stop there. As a performer, he believes theory is the key to, as he puts it, “cutting through the crap” to reach “Mr. Truck Driver.”

“Harmonic and structural underpinning,” he says, “it’s like the Big Wave. If you catch the Big Wave, the piece just comes off clearly. But performers get too caught up in details, in the finery of a performance, and they’re not catching the Big Wave.”

Another way that Pak attempts to reach audiences is through innovative concert presentation.

“Before San Diego shut down, I started the Rush Hour Series. It was only an hour long, at 6:15 p.m. So you could go home and actually watch ‘Seinfeld,’ or you could do laundry, or be with the kids without having to overpay the baby sitter. I did one piece, talked a little bit about it. $10 admission, plus hors d’oeuvres.”

Once the San Diego Symphony is up and running again, he hopes to start another concert series he describes as “Prairie Home Companion Meets Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts,” with himself in the Garrison Keillor/Leonard Bernstein role, aimed at 20-to-30 year olds.

“With orchestras today, I think you have to have two products. One product has to be for the old generation, the way they remember it back in Boston. You have to have the opulence and the velvet and the sense of richness. And then you need to have a completely different product for today’s Big Mac, MTV, Gap jeans type of crowd.”

To reach them, Pak would like to see orchestral musicians get more physically involved in a performance. “‘Now this is very controversial, but the way they play is dry. But you take any of those violin players and say, ‘OK, tomorrow you’re the soloist in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto’--the hair will be flying around, the sweat will be there and the passion will be there.”

Then he gets a conspirator’s smirk on his face, as his dreams of grabbing attention become more radical.

“I’d love to take every single player’s chair and just turn it forward, so they could see if the audience is yawning, asleep, chewing gum, whatever. I’d love to see a model for a professional symphony orchestra where it’s a profit-share situation with the players. And if the audience didn’t like the concert, they could ask for their money back. So the player is then literally playing for his supper.”

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USC SYMPHONY WITH JUNG-HO PAK, CONDUCTOR, Bovard Auditorium, USC. Date: Friday, 8 p.m. Prices: $2-$5. Phone: (213) 740-7111.