Urbane renewal

LATE in September, the St. Louis Symphony began its 126th season with a terrific concert. It was David Robertson’s first as music director of the orchestra.

Robertson, a 47-year-old Southern California native whose career has until now been most prominent in France, is an irrepressible burst of fresh, good news both for this city and for music.

With an arrestingly open and curious mind, a rascally sense of humor and an energizing and controversial conducting technique, he has risen from relative obscurity to prominence in a few short years. Not only is he viewed by many as the savior of this once-major orchestra crippled by deficits and a recent strike -- it will give two concerts this week at Carnegie Hall -- but the New York Philharmonic clearly has its eye and ear on him as a potential successor to Lorin Maazel, who is scheduled to step down in 2009.

In St. Louis, Robertson has attempted to transform the symphony practically overnight with the most adventurous programming in the country, more daring than that in Los Angeles or San Francisco. And by opening night, he had already motivated the most miserable musicians in any major American orchestra (at least to hear them publicly complain); turned on teenagers as well as dowagers; and begun reaching deep into a racially divided community.

Driving around that autumn afternoon, I saw many appealing signs of urban renewal in this fine old city on the Mississippi. In the loft district, once-spectacular industrial buildings have lately become spectacularly livable. I strolled through Forest Park, one of the loveliest city parks in America (where everything, including museum admission, is free).

Then came the orchestra’s exciting, illuminating and decidedly strange concert in Powell Symphony Hall. A handsome, acoustically acceptable former movie palace, the Powell is the centerpiece of a newly designated arts district that has attracted interesting galleries and theaters and a first-rate jazz club (where anyone attending the symphony gets a discount and where Robertson is a regular).

But the next morning, I saw a different St. Louis from a cab on the way to the airport. The driver, a jazz drummer, knew what the symphony was up to and was pleased and impressed that Robertson, whose eclecticism would have put Leonard Bernstein to shame, is a jazz buff and had invited the Wayne Shorter Quartet to perform with the orchestra the following week. He was well acquainted with gentrification and politicians’ boasts.

Yet he trusted no one’s motives and had little good to say about the city. Insisting I see another side of it, he turned off the meter and took a detour through some of the worst parts of town. He pointed out the drug dealers. The terrible poverty needed no pointing out.

“You hear all about New Orleans,” he said, “but this is no better. This is New Orleans. You tell me how David Robertson can change this. How anybody can change this.”

The restoration of a great city is hardly a job for the music director of a symphony orchestra, no matter how inspired or inspiring. But symphony orchestras are also small societies and can serve as models for larger ones.

First, though, St. Louis will have to figure out what to make of a clean-cut, intellectually brilliant music director who can also exhibit a Robin Williams-like wackiness.

The morning of his first concert as music director, he attended a ceremony for the arts district in an outdoor square. Other leaders of the arts, business and the community wore business dress and mouthed platitudes. Robertson had on formal black pants, a casual colored shirt, a rakish white fedora and shades.

His remarks were brief, generous and amusingly to the point. His teenage son, he said, was taking his dad’s opening in stride. But having just discovered Broadway, the kid was way impressed by the fact that “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was playing across the street. That’s why, Robertson concluded, a city needs an arts district.

An untiring activist

ROBERTSON is difficult to capture in print. He wants to jump off the page. He loves to talk and has an exhilarating mind that leaps from idea to idea, but the run-on sentences don’t come out well in transcription. He is a talented mimic who doesn’t always check himself and says things that, if printed, could get him in a lot of trouble.

During an interview in his office, he absent-mindedly banged his fist on a table, hard, while enthusiastically making a point, and that caused my tape recorder to jump and nearly spilled the espressos he had proudly just made for us. He then went into a hilarious, sheepish riff about the loud pop I would hear when playing back our conversation.

What was evident from watching him in St. Louis is that he is an extreme and indefatigable activist who really is out to change the status quo. And his technique for doing that is to absorb and take in as much of the world as he can and then pass it on. In a sense, he considers everything he does a form of education -- be it of the St. Louis musicians, the audience, the administration or himself.

A major priority is young people. The night before his opening concert, he performed the same program -- a challenging one that included rare Stravinsky and Dawn Upshaw singing two seldom-heard Mozart arias and “Lonely Child,” by little-known Canadian composer Claude Vivier, plus John Adams’ momentous “Harmonielehre” -- for high school and college students. Tickets were $10.

The show was an additional financial strain on an orchestra that almost went bankrupt a couple of years ago and almost shut down after a strike last spring. But Robertson let the bottom-liners know that education is not negotiable.

He spoke extensively to the kids, trying to reach their level -- he loves to address audiences and does the preconcert lectures for all of his programs. Then he hung around for hours, making himself available at a post-concert reception. He also presided over a raffle for iPods on which he had programmed 10 selections himself.

In his office the next day, he described his choices. He began with Tracy Chapman singing the inspirational “All That You Have Is Your Soul.”

“She is someone who is so incredible that the pop industry doesn’t know what to do with her,” he said. “I wanted, in my own little way, to say, ‘This is an artist I believe in.’ ”

Next came the haunting jazz singer Lizz Wright, whom Robertson described as “awesome,” doing “Chasing Strange.” “God, I’d love to get her with the orchestra here,” he said. “This is a vocal talent like Ella, not in the same way, but in terms of just the bigness of the artist.”

The great jazz pianist Art Tatum was included “so that they could see real virtuoso stuff.” Robertson picked a standard played by a contemporary jazz pianist, Brad Mehldau. And he programmed hip-hop duo OutKast doing its remarkable version of “My Favorite Things.”

“The guy who does the music stuff is so sophisticated,” Robertson explained. “He’s really, really good. On iTunes, you can download either the clean or the dirty version, but ‘My Favorite Things’ doesn’t have any vocal, so we can have the clean version without losing anything.”

Wayne Shorter, not surprisingly, had made the cut, as had Chet Baker. So had Simon and Garfunkel with “The Boxer.” No Beatles (“My kids call them the old guys”).

Robertson almost forgot to include something classical, but then chose the Tarantella from Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella,” in a recording by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. He also made a world music selection from Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project.

Robertson traces his eclecticism back to his upbringing. He was born in Santa Monica, grew up in Malibu and attended Santa Monica High School.

“We had music at school in those days,” he reminds us, “from first grade on.” There were teachers “who could spot musical enthusiasm in a kid like crazy.” And he recalls that those teachers were just crazy enough to let a seventh-grade horn player conduct. He was 13 when he led his first concert at his junior high. And he just kept at it.

After high school, he left L.A. for London, where he studied horn, conducting and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. And then he began slowly building a conducting career in Europe.

Enormously flexible, Robertson could -- wanted to -- do everything. His first big break came in 1992, when he was invited to become music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the famed Parisian new music group founded by Boulez. He loved new music and had by then developed a reputation for doing daring programs.

But in some circles he was known primarily as a Rossini specialist, and in 1992 he also accompanied Marilyn Horne on a big Rossini tour. In Spain, he was acclaimed for his early Mozart. In Italy, they looked to him to do big late Romantic works.

“Are you really going to be able to do all that complex rhythmic stuff?” he remembers people asking him. “It was so sweet because they really were worried that maybe I had accepted something I shouldn’t.”

In the caldron of controversy

THE Ensemble Intercontemporain position typecast Robertson as a new music specialist and troublemaker. France is full of intellectual fiefdoms, so he shocked the EIC by playing tonal music and by inviting the populist John Adams to conduct it. When he went on to be music director in the conservative city of Lyon, he so frightened sensibilities there that he had to prove himself first by concentrating on the classics. But all the controversy, he says, forced him to come to terms with his own eclecticism.

“I needed to know why I like Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys. Why I like a Morton Feldman piece that goes on for 50 minutes with basically the same thing. Why I think the opening of Mozart’s 29th Symphony is one of the greatest things humanity has to offer. Why, in the hands of a Rossini or Donizetti, four eighth notes in the accompaniment and the thing that goes on the top of it can unleash a just indescribable and almost ridiculous joy in proportion to what the actual material is. They will literally make you laugh out loud because it’s so great.”

What Robertson says he realized was that “any work of a certain complexity sets up expectations and certain promises. The success of the work is how well it fulfills those promises.”

Ever curious, Robertson experiments in rehearsal as much as he can get away with. He asks players to try something one way and then another. He explains himself somewhat and would clearly love to do so more. But he hesitates. Orchestra musicians are notoriously impatient with talk. They want cues.

His approach has gotten Robertson in hot water. When he first conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, he apparently turned off some of the players by talking too much, and he has reportedly tamped down that tendency. Now a regular at the New York Philharmonic, he has learned to be all business with this notoriously snappish group.

But in St. Louis, Robertson appears to have won the players over precisely because he doesn’t keep himself in check. They listen eagerly and try anything. He works hard to make them feel good.

At one rehearsal, he told the orchestra about his first time conducting in the city. It was 1999, and a flutist just back from three months of chemotherapy showed up because he wanted to play in Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe.”

“During the flute solo in the second half,” Robertson says, “he played with a beautiful, pure ethereal tone and no vibrato. But I’m looking at a guy who I would have described as having a bad case of palsy, and I swear to you that the end of his flute -- and I am not exaggerating -- was tracing an arc of 8 to 9 inches. I heard this sound, which was absolutely extraordinary, and I looked at something that the laws of physics say is not possible. To me, that was the spirit of the St. Louis Symphony.”

The players eat it up. But they are also in desperate need of motivation after five bad years.

In 1996, a dull if perfectly respectable Dutch conductor, Hans Vonk, took over an orchestra that had enjoyed 17 years in the limelight with Leonard Slatkin. Ill health forced Vonk to resign in 2002, and the orchestra, in none too great shape to begin with, went into an economic tailspin, hitting rock bottom last spring with its spiteful strike.

Several concerts were canceled. Robertson had his hands doubly tied. A music director, needing to be a conduit between musicians and management, can never become involved in contract negotiations. But because he was still only music director-designate, even his power to operate behind the scenes was limited.

Still, the orchestra came together for Robertson and grumpily settled its dispute in time for a tour to New York.

Publicly, Robertson shows sympathy for both sides. “I think what the frustration is -- and I absolutely agree with it,” he says, “is that the musicians are not paid nearly enough.” The players grudgingly agreed to a $74,000 starting salary, less than two-thirds what the Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians earn. “It’s not right. And part of my job here is that I need to educate the community as to why.”

But Robertson is just as adamant about keeping the orchestra financially sound. “The responsibility to the community is the same as the responsibility to yourself,” he argues. “If you are doing a youth concert for somebody now, you need to be there when that person grows up.”

Thus far, he has managed to tap into the spirit of St. Louis in groundbreaking ways. He makes it a matter of pride not only that he includes lots of new music in his programs but that the programs are chock-full of context linking old and new. He says that scheduled guest conductors, when they saw what he was up to, wanted to do exactly the same thing.

In fact, anywhere he goes, Robertson repeats a program only under duress. This season, for instance, in addition to his St. Louis dates, he will conduct different new and 20th century music with the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In London, he will be responsible for two Elliott Carter programs and an all-day Mozart marathon with the BBC Symphony. When he appears with the L.A. Philharmonic in April, it will be for an unusually conservative evening of Brahms and Dvorak. For him, though, everything is fresh music and, he claims, a welcome and interesting challenge.

“Basically, it’s a lot more work for me,” he says. “But I think it makes more sense for every single concert to be a unique event” -- such as the one in Paris at which he hoped to use Muzak.

“I wanted the people to come into that program and have Muzak playing in the concert hall,” he says. “I contacted the people in Seattle” -- where Muzak originated -- “and what was so great, the poetic justice of the thing, was that they could not understand that someone wanted a tape of their music to be played in the concert hall.

“I wanted to get across to the French public, without words, the sense of what composition means if you are living in this society.”

Open to inspiration

THE idea, he says, comes from John Cage -- “that sound is continuous and only music is intermittent.”

“That’s why I love taxi drivers who leave their radio on. It’s like a composition that starts with a door slam followed by the engine rumble -- a percussive entrance, low rumble of the basses. Then comes the declamatory statement of the singer, and there may be a call-and-response pattern with the taxi driver, who doesn’t understand what the hell you’re talking about or you don’t understand his accent.

“And then comes this imaginary landscape with the radio that is playing stuff.”

Once, on the way to La Scala in Milan, Robertson discovered a Randy Newman song, “In Germany Before the War,” that he found had something new and important to say about the Holocaust.

“We have this horrible sound-bite society, and yet the one saving grace is that if you pay attention, the things that may come out of that are really amazing. And that’s no different than what I do with conducting. There are 95 people, and one may play something that -- if you really listen to it -- can be just amazing.”

That mind-set isn’t much different from what it takes to change an orchestra’s attitude or an audience’s. So far, they’re listening in St. Louis. How long that lasts and how far through the community it travels could change lives.

Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic. He can be contacted at Calendar@

latimes.com.