When the job whirl becomes a sort of dance

Like a newly available bachelor, Christoph von Dohnanyi is going out on lots of dates these days.

The renowned conductor led the top-ranked Cleveland Orchestra for 20 years but, since stepping down in 2000, has been free of the contractual obligation to remain tied exclusively to that ensemble. Now he boasts a dance card filled with American boldface-name bands of Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Chicago -- and Los Angeles, on whose podium he will make his Philharmonic debut Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Yes, he’s eligible and everybody wants him.

But what’s it like to swirl around the floor with a succession of partners? Maybe just a bit unsettling?

“Not at all,” says Cleveland’s conductor laureate. On the phone from his glass-ceilinged atelier in Paris, he speaks of music-making as an intimate affair no matter whom he’s paired with.

“Take the Philharmonic, for example,” he says. “While I never conducted it before, we musicians are a world community. [Principal concertmaster] Martin Chalifour once held the assistant concertmaster’s chair in Cleveland, so of course I know him well, and some of the others too.”

Whoever the personnel, Dohnanyi, at 74, has his methods. “I work hard,” he says with a seductive smile in his voice. “And I indulge a kind of friendly persistence. Very friendly. Very persistent.”

Since leaving Cleveland, the Berlin-born maestro has also taken the helm of the well-funded North German Radio Orchestra in Hamburg, his hometown, where he has returned to live while maintaining directorship of the London Philharmonia. Shaker Heights, the leafy Cleveland suburb where he lived with his children and then-wife, soprano Anja Silja, for two decades, is now mostly a fond memory. But he says that, curiously, Middle American life has followed him back to Hamburg.

“Yes, we have the same beautiful parks and tree-lined streets,” he says. “But now, most striking of all, here and throughout Europe, are the chain stores,” the Starbucks and Gaps that have cropped up since he last lived for long stretches on the Continent.

Not that Dohnanyi is troubled by the influx. “I stay independent of such concerns,” he says. “My life is music and the orchestra.”

He says he chose to leave Cleveland “while at the peak of what I had accomplished with this Rolls-Royce of American orchestras,” which originally bore George Szell’s imprint (1946-70). Over the course of his own tenure, he hired 73 musicians, and the ensemble “had become wonderfully flexible, enough to ignore bar lines and play with a singing quality.”

What makes a great conductor, in Dohnanyi’s estimation, “comes down to personality. And personality is what resides in those 40 centimeters between the brain and the heart.” What makes a great orchestra, he says, is “a collection of personalities, individualists with a facility for playing together and listening to each other who are convinced, as artists, that they must work together.”

Although his Philharmonic program will consist of Mozart, Strauss and Schumann, Dohnanyi has long been known as a modernist. But his reputation as a champion of new music is undeserved, he insists. Starting with Mahler, he says, composers wrote detailed instructions in their scores, meaning that “anyone can do contemporary music. Anyone can learn to do a little piece by Schoenberg.

“I am not a specialist for anything,” he says. “But I do some music very well, and most likely I do the music best which is the best music. In that sense, I span music of all times.”

Dohnanyi’s life has spanned personal horrors as well as artistic triumphs. Beginning in 1938, when he was 9, his three uncles -- among them the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- and especially his father, Hans, took part in the Resistance, playing a central role in abortive plots to assassinate Hitler. In retaliation, all were hanged by the Nazis.

His mother, Christine Bonhoeffer, also an activist, was spared, as were two grandfathers: Karl Bonhoeffer, an eminent psychiatrist, and Hungarian pianist-composer Erno Dohnanyi, with whom he studied music in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1952.

Not surprisingly, Dohnanyi’s worldview reflects the gravity of his losses. He speaks of “the dangerous time we live in” and mentions that he’s “rather proud that Germany opposed the war on Iraq.”

“Americans,” he says, “out of their sense of isolation from the world, are insecure. Therefore they like to elect those who lead through great military might. But if you are trying to defend something by means that are destructive, if you want to liberate a people but kill them in the process, what do you have? How can you expect those people to become your friend?”

But his only brand of activism, he says, is his role as a guardian of culture.

“What I can do as a musician is inform people that what’s left of their country is its culture. We know who was Beethoven, who was Mozart, who was Wagner. But we don’t necessarily know who was the foreign minister. Culture doesn’t have to mean classical music, but it must be something of quality and be supported by the people and their government.”

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Thursday, 8 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.; Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $15-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000