The prodigy at 73: still very much in charge

“Lorin Maazel, phenomenal 9-year-old ... really dominated the Philharmonic.... The chubby little conductor ... came on the stage with a swing and determined vigor that gave evidence of his firm intention.... He held the orchestra every note of the way.”

-- Los Angeles Times,

Sept. 7, 1939

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NEW YORK -- Asked his earliest memories of growing up in Los Angeles, Lorin Maazel, long shed of his baby fat at 73, offers two: being sent to the store with a quarter and overhearing his father take a phone call.

He was 6, he believes, when he went to the store by his parents Spanish-style bungalow, near Pico and La Cienega, and “came home with a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread and some eggs, and I had one penny left over to buy some candy. It’s unbelievable,” recalls Maazel, who these days earns about 8 million quarters for his night job alone.

The phone call carried good news to his father, Lincoln, who was pursuing a career as a singing actor.

“I remember his answering the phone and saying, ‘Gee, they just offered me a role in such and such a film,’ ” says Maazel.

A couple of years ago, he was able to inform his father, then 98, that he too had gotten a call offering him a role -- as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Never mind that he had held a few positions of note since he wielded a baton as a child at the Hollywood Bowl, directing the Deutsch Opera Berlin, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

“Now that’s a real job!” was what the father nearing 100 said to the septuagenarian son, who was making a move into the New York spotlight, and into a classical music opera, as well -- the soap variety.

Lorin Maazel, who reminisced about his career following a rehearsal last week at Carnegie Hall, returns to Southern California this evening near the end of his first season with the New York Philharmonic. He’s coming to the Orange County Performing Arts Center as a guest conductor with the musicians he led before that, the Munich-based Bavarian Radio Symphony.

When he announced he would be retiring as its musical director, Maazel said he had chalked up a “staggering” 5,000 performances during his evolution from child prodigy to elder statesman and wanted to concentrate on composing.

About that time, however, the board of the New York Philharmonic was showing the door to 73-year-old Kurt Masur, after an 11-year tenure. That orchestra supposedly wanted younger blood to replace the stern German traditionalist, someone who might bring new audiences to Lincoln Center.

Up to the challenge

A series of candidates were given shots as guest conductors, in hopes that such musical speed dates would set off love sparks with the veteran New York orchestra members, who were in a “raw emotional state,” as one player described it.

Masur had been “ripped out from under us in a very nasty way,” recalls principal viola player Cynthia Phelps. “The man was not universally loved. He was tough. He yelled at us .... [But] Masur had such a spiritual connection to the music, and that’s what we were used to.... And we were left hanging.”

The orchestra was a daunting challenge for the candidates, especially those who thought they’d want a soothing break from a demanding leader. “Sometimes we get conductors who are a little deferential, who don’t take full charge,” Phelps said, not the least impressed.

Nor was violinist and concertmaster Glenn Dicterow: “If you’re still looking for the next 18-year-old Leonard Bernstein, he’s not there yet.”

When it became evident who the musicians favored as the orchestra’s first American conductor since Bernstein left in 1969, a New York Times critic wrote, in effect: No, not Maazel.

“There had been expectations of a new breed of conductor taking the city by storm,” acknowledges Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s executive director.

What had changed the plot was a guest stint by Maazel, who had not conducted the philharmonic in more than 20 years, in part because his fee was higher than the orchestra paid. But this time, Mehta said, when an executive told the conductor, “That’s our maximum fee, do you want to do it or not?” he agreed to two weeks of concerts.

“That’s what swayed everyone in the orchestra, ‘Let’s get this man,’ ” says Dicterow, the lead violinist. “This man has a genius of talent.”

There was his photographic memory for scores, his to-the-point rehearsals and his pure technique in controlling the pacing and phrasing -- the qualities he’d shown as a 9-year-old. “Just body language and his hands and his eyes -- we know how to read him,” said Dicterow. “He knows exactly how to fix things with his hands. He doesn’t need to talk.”

For all the prodigies who fade, Dicterow believes Maazel shows the value of having been one, especially in conducting, where most others don’t start until they’re in their 20s. “He feels very much at home on the podium.”

Taking charge

But early success -- which Maazel had with the violin as well as conducting -- also can build an ego. Though no composer today can get away with the temper tantrums of a Toscanini, Maazel definitely is of the old school and the mystique of the maestro. Phelps, the viola player, learned quickly that he “knows how he wants to spend every second” at rehearsal, so it’s often best to hold questions until a break and not “risk breaking his flow.”

Maazel knows the philharmonic had concerns when hiring him, beyond his age or his price, believed to be about $2 million a year. “In the long run are we going to have trouble with this guy?” he imagines them asking, it being no secret that he left some other posts on less than cordial terms.

That’s why it was helpful, he says, that conditions “couldn’t have been dicier” when he joined them last year, bonding with the players through the hurried preparations for the premiere of John Adams’ reflections on the Sept. 11 attacks, “On the Transmigration of Souls,” then a grueling tour of the Far East. “All this comes out quickly,” he said of the personality issues.

Maazel knows what it’s like to deal with an intimidating figure, like conductor Leopold Stokowski, who kept changing how the musicians were positioned during the 1939 Hollywood Bowl rehearsals.

“So I decided that I was going to take the bull by the horns and ask the great maestro, ‘Um, what would the layout be for the concert?’ and he looked down at me and put his hand to his silver hair and said, ‘Only God knows.’ I was stupefied. I mean, can you imagine a 9-year-old boy hearing this from the great maestro?”

Maazel’s family left L.A. not long after to follow his music teacher to Pittsburgh, where his father worked in a munitions plant during WW II and eventually resumed acting. Today, at 100, Lincoln Maazel lives on his famous son’s sprawling farm in Virginia, which has a tennis court that, the conductor insists, has also taught him the perils of ego.

Maazel has four grown children and three younger ones -- a girl, 10, and two boys, 13 and 15 -- from his third marriage. The boys keep him in his place, he says, as when the younger, at 7, offered to fix his computer. “I said, ‘Look son, this is a real adult computer.’ He says, ‘Excuse me, Dad, but I really think I can fix that.’ ‘Oh really?’ says I, really miffed at this point. ‘Go ahead. Be my guest.’

“He fixed it in three seconds.”

Maazel, who today maintains his own Web site (maestro maazel.com), admits he wasn’t so ready to be humbled in younger days, when he would challenge a now-grown son in tennis and felt “personally affronted” by any notion that the kid might win. Today? His 15-year-old “does the drop shot-lob thing on his poor old father. The problem is, he knows I’m still dreadfully conscientious. ‘Conscientious’ is not the word -- I’ve got false pride. I go for the drop shot rather than lose the point. So I lose the point anyway and get worn out in the process.”

At 73, though, Maazel remains a strong presence on the podium. His ego does not seem all that eroded, either, as when he relates how command on the stage can combat a nagging problem in concert halls, coughing. “It may be overweening conceit,” he says, “but folks really don’t cough at my concerts.”

This evening, he will lead the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Brahms’ first three symphonies, while Thursday’s program pairs Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 with Debussy’s “La Mer” and Strauss’ Orchestral Suite from “Der Rosenkavalier.”

His orchestras

Maazel says that the Bavarian orchestra is different from the New York Philharmonic in that it’s largely made up of soloists: “I defer to a lot of phrasing ideas. If they have an idea about a phrase, I’ll listen to it. If I disagree, we’ll talk.

“Now the New York Philharmonic, they were very keen to have leadership. They feel so confident of what they have to offer, they’re not afraid to follow.”

In either case, though, the musical interpretations will be his. “For better or worse, I have a clear idea what I want,” Maazel says, “and irrespective of the orchestra in front of me, I’m going to try to achieve that.”

If there’s a tendency to see him as an interim leader in New York -- until the orchestra again searches for the new-new thing -- Maazel isn’t buying it. “I would never have been an interim anything,” he says. “I made it quite clear that I would give it my all and we’ll see if I want to stay past the four years....

“I just feel I’m just getting started,” says the conductor with a 100-year-old father. “You know, I don’t have any illusions. I don’t dye my hair and don’t get face lifts. ‘I am what I am,’ to quote Popeye the Sailor Man.”

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Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Today and tomorrow, 8 p.m.

Price: $19-$59

Contact: (949) 553-2422