Leading the Cheer for Mozart and Co.

If classical music were to hire itself a publicist, Robert Kapilow would be first in line for the job.

“The idea of getting an uninterested America interested in classical music is right up my alley,” says the 46-year-old composer, conductor and commentator in his usual chirpy, high-energy tone. “Is classical music’s audience dwindling? I don’t think so. I think pretty much everyone in America is my audience.”

Teaching brand loyalty to youngsters, Kapilow has set Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” to a classical score and conducts children’s concerts around the country. To woo teens for a millennium composition about Washington, D.C., he studies up on hip-hop in his car, looking for parallel ways to discuss classical music. For adults, he has made public television appearances and created the long-running “What Makes It Great” for NPR’s “Performance Today.”

And to reach everyone in between, he has formed long-term partnerships with communities from Boston to Kansas City to Cerritos, going into workplaces, community centers, local libraries, schools and concert halls to deliver interactive “informances” that aim to demonstrate to his massive target audience that classical music isn’t dying on the vine, just in need of an image adjustment.

On Sept. 29, Kapilow will dissect the wonders of Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, with help from Canada’s St. Lawrence String Quartet, now on the faculty at Stanford University. Kapilow returns in April to explore “Classical Song,” and in May for “Chopin: The Complexity of Beauty.” (He is also scheduled to conduct the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in two children’s programs at Cerritos in November.)

Kapilow says he chose the Mozart piece because it has been widely heard (“it’s in the most car commercials”) and offers surprises even for the yawning aficionado. “In the first 20 seconds there are a thousand things you’ve never heard,” he says. “I love taking people--including myself!--who think they know this piece inside out and you get to hear what you’ve missed. The things we’re often most familiar with--whether it be a marriage or a piece of music--are often the things we ignore the most. Unless you slow it down, the whole thing just goes by.”

On this morning, rains from Hurricane Floyd have kept Kapilow at home in River Vale, N.J., where he lives with his wife and three young children, a built-in focus group for his kids’ compositions. During this conversation, as on stage, Kapilow talks almost nonstop. He plunges into a mini phone presentation every now and then, striking chords on the electric keyboard in his office, where he regularly stays up until 3:45 a.m., composing in the wee hours.

From the stage, he manages to get his audiences to loosen up, clap their hands, tap their feet and prick up their ears. His “special guests”--different musicians brought in for each venue--play the first several seconds of whatever piece is under discussion. Then he spends several minutes picking it apart, banging out phrases on the piano and going on in everyday parlance (“Got it?” and “Listen to this”).

Bouncing around like a hyperactive schoolkid, he flaps his hands and belts out da-da-dee-dum phonetics to get people to hear the patterns that form a musical line, and to note the tiny surprise choices that make a phrase of music sing.

“Oh, my God!” he will shout, his voice skidding up the octave like a runaway violin until it nearly cracks from the strain of his enthusiasm.

“This is boring,” he will go on, purposefully clunking up a banal version of a famous line. Then he will play it again with the appropriate attention to detail: “The difference between great and ordinary is tiny changes,” he says.

To help make his point, he might mention Picasso’s ability to see a bull in the seat and handlebars of a bicycle or Robert Frost’s facility for turning a fork in the road into a poem. He often quotes E.M. Forster and dabbles in sports metaphors as well. “Art,” he is fond of saying in myriad variations, “is about paying attention to ordinary things that we take for granted and seeing possibilities in them.”

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Kapilow got started on this career path as a conventional music student--studying at Yale University. Near the end of his training, he had a crisis of faith. “I said to myself, ‘This is it? This is being trained?’ ”

So he went to Paris to live in a tiny room and study with the legendary Nadia Boulanger for a summer, and stayed for more than a year. It was, he says, “the defining experience of my life musically. When I was a kid, I was a very emotive performer with a lot of pizazz, but I didn’t pay much attention if I missed a note here and there. [Boulanger] was the one who showed me how great each note was, instead of the grand sweep of things. We would spend a month writing one measure of a harmony exercise.”

He came back, finished school, pursued graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music and taught at Yale for five years. Then in 1983 he conducted the Broadway musical “Nine,” based on Fellini’s “8 1/2,” and quit his academic job.

“The one thing I got from my Broadway experience, whatever you think of the music, the audience gets it,” he says. “Then you go to a classical concert, and that’s just not the case. The electricity feeling is just not the same.” He says that realization hit home one night while he was guest-conducting at the Kennedy Center. “I remember it was just such a depressing night, because you feel so unconnected. I wanted to have something real-er than that go on.”

First, he began giving preconcert talks as a means to help illuminate the music. But he wanted to find a way to integrate the verbal program notes into the concert experience, “to make the event about listening,” he says. In the last several years, he has done arts outreach work with groups as diverse as blind children in Boston and Hallmark executives in Kansas City.

He says he studies his target audience, reading local papers and quizzing cabdrivers on the ride in from the airport to take the communal pulse.

“It’s important to talk to who you are talking to,” he says. “I tailor everything I do insofar as I’m capable of. When I go into a company the first thing I do is ask, ‘What are the top 10 issues for your company?’ And does that suggest something as an approach to the music? When the Bay Bank and BankBoston merged, that whole issue of how you merge two musical ideas and keep them separate and yet keep them unified became a core to the presentation I was doing on Bartok. I try to see if something in their world is relevant in my world.”

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Kapilow says he plans to come to Cerritos two days early to do his homework. Cerritos Center executive director Wayne Shilkret calls Kapilow “a ball of fire” who has already sold 500 of 900 tickets to the Cerritos event. Shilkret was so enthusiastic about Kapilow after his visit here last year that he secured a grant to bring him back.

“It takes a great deal of courage to stand in front of an audience who doesn’t know anything about classical music and get them going,” Shilkret says, remembering how Kapilow mesmerized employees from the local Edison company at a lunchtime lecture. “These are people normally if you gave them tickets to a classical music concert, they wouldn’t come. He connects.”

“One of the things I find most different is there is a kind of willingness to try in Cerritos,” Kapilow says. “In Boston there’s a great amount of classical music; if you’ve chosen not to participate in it, it’s because it’s not what you’re interested in. But often in Cerritos many people have really had no experience with it.”

But that doesn’t mean he’s advocating Mozart for Dummies. “One of the important things to me is that you never dumb down any of what makes this stuff great,” he says. “When I’m doing Mozart for 6-year-olds, I’m going to teach them the same stuff I was teaching in graduate courses at Yale. I’m just going to change the presentation.”

Kapilow says that teaching people to pay attention to classical music benefits modern life in general: “Whether you’re talking about cooking, poetry, art, fine construction in a car, watchmaking--the ability to pay attention to something done superbly and to have that mean something to you is hard in a world where so many things are coming at you. Pop music is not designed for you to have to listen well to get it. If you decide to pay attention, nothing rewards you more than classical music. In the end it comes down to one thing: Listen well.” *

* Robert Kapilow’s “What Makes It Great: ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik,’ ” Wednesday, 7 p.m., Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. $12. (800) 300-4345 or (562) 916-8500.