NEW YORK CONDUCTOR TO VISIT S.D.

SAN DIEGO —  This week, while music director David Atherton is in Sweden with the Stockholm Philharmonic, the San Diego Symphony will be conducted by Christopher Keene, music director of the New York City Opera.

A Californian who grew up in San Francisco, he also is music director of the Long Island Philharmonic Orchestra, which he founded in 1979. “I spend half the year in opera and half in symphony,” Keene said.

As an opera conductor, he finds that he is as much a coordinator of activities as a conductor. “In opera you have to be prepared for the kinds of disasters that happen all the time: Doors don’t open; people forget their lines; they fall down staircases. You have to be able to stay with the soprano when she’s having a good night . . . and on the bad nights.

“It requires a great deal of flexibility and steady nerves. With the symphony you have to be extremely precise--not so much room to maneuver. It’s a much more civilized form of conducting.”

The first work on this week’s program is the Henry Cowell Symphony No. 4. Cowell was a Californian and “a ceaseless investigator of other musical styles,” Keene said. Keene referred to Cowell as one of a group of American composers from the 1930s and 1940s, including Schuman, Hansen, Harris and Piston, who form “a whole forgotten chapter in our musical heritage. European countries treasure their own composers. I think we should take pride in that part of our heritage.”

The Cowell symphony includes musical forms of a ballad, hymn and jig. Although it contains some 20th-Century dissonances, Keene said, due to the piece’s fidelity to 19th-Century forms it “could be difficult to tell when it was written.”

The other work on the program is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3. “We always hear numbers 4, 5 and 6, which are the great masterworks,” Keene said, “but it is interesting to discover 1, 2 and 3, which have distinctive and fascinating features. It’s a pity they aren’t played more often.”