A man and his music

Alex Coolman

This season of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra marks the 10th anniversary of its musical director, Carl St.Clair. During his tenure, the

organization has experienced tremendous success, with its presence on the

national scene gaining credibility and definition, and its popularity at

home steadily increasing.

The 47-year-old conductor keeps up a packed schedule, shuttling back and

forth between California and Europe, where he is the principal guest

conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra. St.Clair is also a visiting

artist at the University of Southern California, and his prominence on

the domestic and international music scene has helped to keep the Pacific

Symphony’s star rising.

This success was cast in shadow this summer by the accidental death of

St.Clair’s 18-month-old son. But the conductor has made a tremendous

effort to overcome this personal tragedy, returning quickly to the public

work that he finds meaningful. St.Clair spoke in a recent interview of

the strength he draws from the symphony and his thoughts about the past

10 years of the organization’s development.

Q: In the past decade, the Pacific Symphony Orchestra expanded

tremendously. Ticket revenues and the budget have both gone up

considerably in the years since you’ve been here. Could you talk a bit

about what you feel your role has been in the growth of the orchestra?

A: The Pacific Symphony Orchestra has really been a terrific success

story in the last 10 years. I’m sure we are all aware of the various

economic ups and downs and the various markets in Orange County in the

last 10 years that have really cost many cities in California their

orchestral life. We know the various plights of, let’s say, San Diego.

And the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. It’s taken a toll on orchestras in

cities like San Jose, although they’re coming back, and Sacramento and

Oakland and I’m sure the list is even longer.

But during this time, the Pacific Symphony has been able to maintain a

very strong financial base. Our audiences have actually grown. On almost

every front, in spite of the various difficult times, which we are now on

the upswing from, we have either maintained or gotten better in almost

every avenue of what a symphony orchestra’s life actually encompasses.

For that, we owe the credit to our donors, the people who support us. We

owe that to our audience that was willing to stick with us, and a

subscriber base who is committed to have concerts as part of their

cultural life in Orange County.

I think certainly I would be remiss if we would leave out the fact that

we have the [Orange County] Performing Arts Center. It’s been an

important catalyst. The Pacific Symphony today would not be where it is

had it not moved into The Center itself. And I think our leadership has

just been terrific. Louis Spisto, in many of his years, we were a dynamic

duo, a one-two punch, and I think that really helped keep the fires lit.

And now that he’s gone on to Detroit and now New York, I think John

Forsyte is doing a wonderful job.

He came on in, in 1998?

Yeah, he’s been here just a little over a year, but I mean he’s just

picked up as though there was never a moment of slack, and I think the

leadership from our board of directors has just grown and gotten more

inspiring and deeper. I think that one of the great things about anyone

who’s connected with the Pacific Symphony is that every ounce of energy

they spend, every cent that in any kind of philanthropic way they give to

the orchestra is all spent in a positive, constructive way.

In other words, we’re not using any energy or any money to correct

problems or ills of the past or mistakes of the past. That gives everyone

a very optimistic, very positive energy cycle, with which to roll around

in. And this is something that not every orchestra or not every city can

say. So that’s why, in growing the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, we have to

do it slowly and in parallel. Orange County is not that old, the

orchestra is not that old, you know.

So we’re all developing our relationship in a very hand-in-hand way,

which makes for a very positive future. It’s when one or the other

components of this relationship gets out of sync with the others that

relationship problems develop.

Q: How do you decide on how to strike a balance between more conservative

decisions, for holiday programs and things people always expect to hear,

and more difficult work.

A: Programming is really what the music director -- meaning that musical

spokesperson for the PSO board -- that’s where the relationship is built

between the audience and the orchestra, through the decisions that the

music director makes in programming.

Because basically I would be considered a musical chef, in which I’m

inviting you to my house for dinner and I’m cooking you a musical meal

every time you’re invited in. If it’s always the same meal, you would get

tired of coming. If it’s always such exotic food that you go home with

some kind of stomach problem, then that would also be an unacceptable

invitation.

But there is a trust. Over a period of 10 years, what’s happened, I

think, is that the majority of the audience knows that I’m thinking about

them. They know that the programming decisions that I’m making have them

in mind. They know that there’s some order, some plan, some larger

scheme. It’s not just every night a smorgasbord or a sort of pot luck, if

you will.

Q: I’m struck by what a complex role you have to fill. Not only do you

have to have this standard of musical excellence, but you also have to

act as a sort of manager for all the various musicians and their various

interests, to get them to mesh into a single product. And then you have

to think about how that’s going to relate to the community. You’re at the

intersection of so many interests.

A: You know, it’s true. Today, the job of a 20th century American music

director has grown in complexity. A very large part of my job, for

instance, is public speaking. And in addition to that, and to attending

meetings of all kinds, I’m also a very very hands-on music director as

far as our education program, working with our education director and our

assistant conductor and our youth programs, our Class Act programs, our

Mervyn’s Family Concert Series, our youth concert series, the classical

raves, and then I do one myself, which is the Classical Connections,

which is sort of for older audiences.

You have to also work very closely with the president of the

organization, with budgets. I mean, they say “Well we can’t have five

Midoris in one season. That’s expensive, you know.” So we have to say,

“well we need so many violinists, so many cellists, who are they? What’s

their repertoire? What sort of complements our season by being different

from the last one so we don’t have a series of soloists who all have the

same basic persona, the same musical slant.” All of these are factors.

And then there is the orchestra itself. There’s the orchestra committee

and the personnel director and so there are many components and it is

very complicated.

But I love it, I thrive on it. When you have these kind of energies

moving toward the same focal point, it serves only to energize me, to

make me realize how blessed I am, how fortunate I am to have this kind of

symphony orchestra.

Q: Obviously you’ve gone through tremendous difficulty in your personal

life and you’ve come back into your career very quickly and with a

tremendous amount of enthusiasm. Are you willing to talk a little bit

about your perspective on things?

A: We’re trying to reel that from the public arena, where it was from a

long period of time. What we’re trying to do in our family and with our

close friends now is to kind of reel it in, to pull it into the more

private, personal sanctums, because inevitably this is where it’s going

to have to be dealt with. So that’s where we are today, and for me -- and

I will only speak for me personally -- I am an artist, you know. That’s

who I am. So, whatever I deal with is dealt with as an artist, through my

art. So for me to do otherwise would be contradictory to who I am as a

spirit. It would have been impossible for me not to have reentered. This

is who I am. That would have been denying me of myself.

And being back with the Pacific Symphony, being back with the audiences

like we did at the opening of the Mahler 8 or at the commemorative

concert we did with the music of John Williams at Irvine Meadows, it was

very healing for me. To be back with the Pacific Chorale did so much for

us during those darkened times. The Pacific Symphony family, the staff,

the orchestra, the board of directors, they were standing by us through

all of this.

But to be back with them in the elation and the jubilatory scene of a

concert, really it’s like seeing the first bloom of a rejuvenation of

life. So that’s what’s great for us. And I would like to say that my

wife, Susan, her spirit is very very strong, her faith is strong. We’re

both supporting one another and doing the best we can. She’s done

marvelous. But we have so many friends. Without the prayers and all of

the various acts of compassion, from e-mails to phone calls to prayers to

masses to prayer session to hugs, we see some people nodding on the

street ... We had one lady who was stopped at a stop sign and we were

stopped across the street and she just mouthed “I’m praying for you.”

That, you know, brings you to tears immediately. So without all this

compassion, it really would be impossible for us to be where we are

today.

Really, we didn’t know how deeply our relationship with our community

went, because we’re always in the public eye, but this outpouring was so

overwhelming that we didn’t know if we had the grace to really accept it

gracefully. But it just showed the depth of the relationship that we had

made with our community. It made us very very proud.