Not Bowed or Baroque, Leppard Moves Forward

The Italian government has honored him for rescuing Monteverdi’s operas from obscurity. His own government recognized his early-music contributions as conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra and other British ensembles from the 1960s to the ‘80s. Headlines such as “The rock of Baroque” and “If it ain’t baroque, don’t mend it” follow him still.

But anyone who thinks it untypical of Raymond Leppard to conduct a program by Maurice Ravel, Joaquin Rodrigo and Camille Saint-Saens--as he does tonight and Thursday in Costa Mesa--better think twice.

“I’ve been in Indianapolis for 10 years!” Leppard said in a phone interview from his home there last week. “Those Baroque days have vanished into the mists of obscurity. I don’t do that any more . . . I became so old-fashioned in my time, I said to myself I’d better retire from [early music] and let others get on with it!”

Although he turns 70 this year, he’s hardly retired from anything else. (Anything fun planned for the big day? “I never not do fun,” he said with a gentle chuckle.)

With 200 recordings under his belt, the contracts keep coming. The Indianapolis Symphony, one of only 18 full-time orchestras operating in this country, is flourishing: It’s debt-free, Leppard reported, “and we’ve just had a $10-million gift. Just in time for the holidays.”

Leppard had just returned from his own holidays at a nature preserve in Florida. “I’m a bird-watcher--of the feathered sort, you understand,” he said. “I saw a lot of birds that I’ve never seen--it was a staggering place. Rather healthy, too--bicycling, swimming. . . . Not the idea Queen Victoria might have had for Christmas.”

At home for one night before departing for Orange County, he was looking out onto a halcyon scene including birds, bird feeders and trees and a swimming pool covered for the winter. He’d been going through his mail and enjoying a glass of wine.

But Leppard’s new year is off to a rousing start at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where he leads the Pacific Symphony in Ravel’s “Rapsodie espagnole,” Rodrigo’s “Fantasia para un gentilhombre” (with Christopher Parkening as guitar soloist) and Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, the “Organ Symphony.”

Expect little Leppardian restraint in the Saint-Saens.

“Absolutely not! You wait till you hear it,” he said. “There’s a certain amount, I hope, of French elegance, but when the big C-major moment comes--it’s . . . going . . . to . . . come! Even Bach would have been proud of me.”

*

Leppard has spoken of the need to embrace compromise in early music--compromising what is believed to be authentic performance practice against what might best communicate that music now--and he applies the same concept to the Romantic repertory.

“Saint-Saens is more than 100 years ago. . . . Aren’t we coming up to 2000?” he asked. “Rossini knew Saint-Saens. Berlioz knew him and said that ‘all he lacked was inexperience.’ What I’m saying is that he belongs to another era.

“You make the compromise by inhabiting the time you live in--by making [the music] sound well for the time you live in and for the audience that comes to listen.

“What you produce must be a compromise,” he continued. “You play a Beethoven Symphony at 20, and it’s quite a different experience from playing it at 60. The players, the audience, the concert hall, in 40 years they will have all changed.

“That’s the thrilling thing--and what the Old Music people, the solid authenticos, don’t take into account. They are so solemn about it, so po-faced. That means they never smile.”

Leppard has described himself as “pro-choice in favor of tolerance”; his stance extends beyond politics and onto the podium.

“I despise intolerance in every conceivable way,” he said. “And [tolerance for compromise] must [also] apply to music. All those things are about the sheer flexibility of what you’ve learned from life and what life is doing to you at that moment. I know of no better way to describe the business of performing.”

* Raymond Leppard leads the Pacific Symphony in works by Ravel and Saint-Saens tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Christopher Parkening is guitar soloist in Rodrigo’s “Fantasia para un gentilhombre.” 8 p.m. $16-$44. (714) 556-2787.