COMPOSER TRUE TO HIS TEMPERAMENTS

Harold Shapero has a lot going against him. For one thing, he bemoans, “In the New York area alone, there are two other composers with my name--one of them even spells it the same way.”

For another, Shapero--the one whose Symphony for Classical Orchestra will receive its local premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Andre Previn this week--completes a composition only every once in a while (his last commission was in 1972), and receives royalty checks from performances and recordings of same with about as much frequency.

So how has the 66-year-old musician survived? The answer is academic: For 36 years he’s been a drawing a steady paycheck as a member of the Brandeis University faculty, where he now heads the electronic music studio. “My friends have advised me to stay in the office,” he says, adding with a chuckle, “I’ve assured them I wasn’t interested in starving.”

To support Shapero’s practicality, consider that the concerts, at the Music Center tonight, Friday and Sunday, plus Saturday at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, mark the first complete readings of the 40-minute opus since the year of its premiere--1948. (The performances are being underwritten by the AT&T; American Encore series.)

Shapero harbors no hard feelings toward the music Establishment for his lack of recognition as a composer. He even admits to sharing some of the blame.

“I’m a notoriously slow worker,” he says. “The Symphony took me two years to finish. It started out as a 20-minute divertimento and grew into a bit of a monster. Gradually, all this music started emerging. That happens when you’re young (he was 27). I was surprised at how long it turned out.

“I’m like Beethoven in my work habits. I have a desk covered with huge unfinished projects.”

The Beethoven reference extends beyond his deliberate approach to writing: Much of Shapero’s music--including the Symphony--has shown Neo-Classical leanings. The score even calls for the same orchestral forces as Beethoven’s Fifth.

“I’ve always admired the Classical period because of the sense of order,” Shapero says. “But mostly, back in the ‘40s, I was reacting against the Expressionist movement. I don’t know if every American boy should write in the Schoenberg style. I tried the 12-tone technique, but objected to it. It seemed those composers had developed a language of negative emotion.”

Stravinsky was an early influence, he notes. “Lukas Foss, Irving Fine and I were his early American friends. And we’d all studied with Nadia Boulanger, who was a Stravinsky-phile.”

Shapero certainly hung around with the right people in his younger days. Still, his work, even the accessible Symphony, didn’t win him many admirers. When Leonard Bernstein led the Boston Symphony in the first performance of the piece, the composer recalls, “One critic snarled, ‘Imagine if Mahler lived outside of Boston.’

“I don’t mind that. It’s always been that way: The world goes one way and I go the other. I still believe that natural and spontaneous melody is our surest way of communication. Schoenberg once said that it was still possible to write a good piece in G major.”

In these days of the so-called New Romanticism boom, marking a return to tonality, it might seem that Shapero’s time has come. The composer dismisses the current wave (“I hear a lot of sound today, but it’s empty of content”), declining to be affiliated with it.

However, Philharmonic composer-in-residence John Harbison, who, with Previn, chose to revive Shapero’s Symphony, does see a link. In fact, that’s one reason the work was resurrected.

“Tonal thinking is more acceptable these days,” notes Harbison. “We’ve seen a lot of strange developments (in music) over the last 15 years. But I believe that this work may finally have its best audience, now that the dust has settled.”

Shapero remains unfazed about winning such favor, commenting, “You can’t get free from your own temperament.” A query about his place in the grand scheme of things elicits a similar lack of concern: “There’s Mozart on one side, and tone deafness on the other.

“I’m somewhere in the middle.”