James Levine’s weighty decision

Having lost 35 pounds following shoulder surgery, James Levine wants to lose 15 more as he tries to focus on his health with the same energy he devotes to music.

Levine, music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, tore his right rotator cuff when he fell leaving the stage at Boston’s Symphony Hall on March 1. He returns to the podium on July 7, when he opens the BSO’s Tanglewood season conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 -- the same program he led the night he got hurt.

“I wanted to find a diet that was right. I didn’t want to do a crash diet and then gain everything back,” he said this week in a telephone interview from Lenox, Mass.

Levine, who turned 63 Friday, was forced to cancel a U.S. tour with the BSO, four operas at the Met, a gala honoring outgoing Met general manager Joseph Volpe and the Met’s June tour of Japan.

He has had health problems in recent years -- sciatica that has led him to conduct from a chair and a tremor in his left arm that became noticeable in the 1990s but has lessened. When taking curtain calls after performances, his face has been red and filled with perspiration.

“Sciatica is my main aggravation,” he said. “I also worked with a trainer the whole time just to try to put me in a better muscular balance and equilibrium since normally I’m standing or sitting most of the time.”

He wouldn’t disclose what he weighed before the surgery -- “No way,” he said jovially.

Levine said many times previously that he wanted to lose weight, but the constant rehearsals and performances left him little time to focus on fitness. He frequently could be seen after performances in New York having a late-night meal at a restaurant near the opera house.

When he injured his shoulder, it became clear that he would need surgery that would necessitate his first extended break from conducting since he made his Met debut in 1971. He became chief conductor two years later, music director in 1976 and artistic director in 1986 -- a title that was downgraded back to music director when he took on the BSO job in 1994.

“It allowed me to restart. Everything in the training, everything in the diet could be done without my having to save energy for rehearsals and performances,” he said. “What’s very important to my work is the continuity and repetition, to be able to go deeper and to have the response of the orchestra, etc., deeper. This thing forced me -- I never would have stopped -- this forced me to use the time to get to a different state.”

Unlike baseball pitchers who have similar operations, Levine isn’t worried about the state of his shoulder.

“I can tell that when the rehab is finished, that it is going to be better than ever,” he said. “The doctor said to me from day one that the operation, when it healed and when the rehab was finished, it would make the shoulder better than ever. So I didn’t have to worry whether it would come back, and that gave me a certain positive energy.”

He is working with the Met and the BSO to create breaks in his performance calendar, which is split between his home in New York and Boston. He said it’s “a little trial and error,” but the goal was to create a schedule “so that I’m not necessarily trying to do it at the same rate I did when I was 30.”