‘I’m Just Now Feeling at Home’ : Carl St.Clair Is Happy to Stick With Pacific Symphony Till 2001, but Is It a Good Career Move?

Carl St.Clair signed on last week to lead the Pacific Symphony through 2001 because he believes it is a good career move.

The new contract, which will extend to 11 years his total service to Orange County’s foremost orchestra, allows the 45-year-old music director to accept other assignments, as he has done by guest-conducting the New York Philharmonic, among other orchestras. But with a few younger conductors securing more prestigious posts in recent years--including Esa-Pekka Salonen, who took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic at 34--does the new commitment signal a leveling off of St.Clair’s professional ascent?

St.Clair says he is right where he wants to be. He makes about $145,000 a year. He and his wife, Susan, are expecting their first child in January. And he regards the Pacific as a secure orchestra, financially sound in a county with unlimited potential.

Observers outside the county agree that St.Clair is in a good spot career-wise, despite the success of some of his younger peers.

“Career paths for conductors in America are hard to generalize about,” said Donald Thulean, vice president for orchestra services at the Washington-based American Symphony Orchestra League. “The jump from assistant conductor--as Carl was in Boston--to music director is the difficult jump, particularly to an orchestra of Pacific Symphony level. . . .

“Carl is at a very good age and a good place for him. My perception is that the orchestra has grown under his direction and that Carl has grown, and that’s the real test: How both the institution and the individual flourish, as it were, because they’re working together.”

But Mariedi Anders, who runs her own artists management company out of San Francisco, suggested that “it’s not a good thing to stay in one place for too many years.”

She pointed to her client Hans Graf. “[He] has been with me for many years, was 10 years the conductor of the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg, and he stays and stays in Salzburg. It’s no good. No one hears about him. You think it’s a dream job? Maybe not for 10 years.”

Similarly, Kathryn Takach of the Thea Dispeker management agency in New York, recommends that their clients stay six to 10 years at a post. “The most would be 10 years.”

Others in the management field, however, disagree with such a timetable.

Judie Janowski, a vice president at Columbia Artists Management in New York, said, “There are no models or markers.”

And Edna Landau, managing director of IMG Artists in New York, said St.Clair’s overall reputation is more important than his tenure in Orange County.

“There was a real buzz about Carl before he went to the Pacific Symphony,” she said. “People knew about him and knew about his work. He had already appeared at Tanglewood, he was supported by Leonard Bernstein. All that was known. It spoke in his favor. Because he’s done really good work [in Orange County] and been in a place where his performances have been reviewed regularly, he can probably afford to stay there a little longer. The word does get out on the grapevine.”

According to ASOL’s Thulean, music directors tend to stay from 10 to 13 years at a post. “[It] seems to be the most common pattern just now. A generation ago it tended to be much longer.”

If St.Clair feels stifled here and eager to move on to a larger orchestra, he doesn’t show it.

“Every career takes its own shape,” he said over coffee recently. “My career has been unusual from the very start. It’s unusual having a south Texas farm life as your background and not hearing a symphony orchestra until you’re 17, not playing in one until you’re a senior in high school, not hearing a note of Tchaikovsky until you’re in college.

“These are things that don’t normally cultivate a conductor in this part of the century.”

Still, St.Clair’s conducting career took a parabolic rise when he came to Bernstein’s notice in 1985 at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony.

“As far as I’m concerned, my professional career only started about 10 years ago when I became a student at Tanglewood and when I became the assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony. . . . That’s when I basically began my career as a professional conductor, as opposed to an academician--a conductor in the academic realm.”

St.Clair arrived in Orange County to a Pacific Symphony “in great turmoil” just after the ouster of founding music director Keith Clark, orchestra executive director Louis G. Spisto said.

“Carl began to make an impact from the first year,” Spisto said, “but we were not really ready to support ambitious artistic programs such as we now have for an orchestra our size: a composer in residence, recordings, major outreach programs, commissions. It took more than five years to build the financial base for that.”

St.Clair didn’t want to move too fast in making personnel changes or initiating those projects.

“In the first three years, your first contract, you’re not even sure if you’re to have another contract,” he said. “So you get to know the orchestra, the orchestra gets to know you, but you don’t really tamper with things too much. . . . It was in my second contract, when I knew that I was going to be here for another five years, that I realized we could begin a relationship building.

“So I really relaxed a little bit. The intensity level, the pressure to improve everything all the time at every given moment sort of subsided when I realized I was going to be here for quite a bit of time, and now I could very strategically work on the orchestra’s development. It might sound a little odd, but you know, I’m just now feeling at home with this orchestra.”

As St.Clair looks ahead, he sees two obstacles to the orchestra’s development. Neither, he feels, is insurmountable.

“One is the fact that we don’t play every month. That’s difficult. Even though we do play the opera or the ballet or the pops and we are together as a group, it’s with a different conductor, it’s with a different style or type of repertoire.

“And the other thing is that our contract [with the musicians] allows certain leniency when it comes to requiring our players to be there. I understand why . . . but those are things that hinder the step-by-step growth of an orchestra. But they’re not insurmountable. It just takes longer.”

He acknowledges that a time may come when the growth trajectories of the orchestra and St.Clair no longer match.

“I don’t know where I want to be in five years,” he said. “I’ve never thought in those terms.”

Still, a better job might come along.

St.Clair is one of 12 finalists auditioning with the Utah Symphony as part of its search for a music director to replace retiring Joseph Silverstein. The Utah Symphony, which has an impressive international reputation through its recordings, plays 18 pairs of classical concerts, as opposed to the Pacific’s 10. Its budget is $8.5 million, compared to the Pacific’s $7.3 million.

St.Clair is scheduled to guest-conduct there in December, and the orchestra’s hiring decision is expected in early 1998.

“Two years ago, I was invited to go to Utah to be a guest conductor and a potential candidate for the job,” St.Clair said. “That was before I knew what was going to come about with the Pacific Symphony contract. Things were going well, but in this business, you never know. So certainly I’m interested enough in them to guest-conduct. But I simply don’t know.”

Meanwhile, Orange County looks pretty good to him. Orchestras in many other U.S. communities, including San Diego and Sacramento, have either folded or are barely alive. But the Pacific has managed for six years running to balance its books and to maintain a steady audience growth.

Still, “We have a lot of work to do to bring a cultural tradition to Orange County,” St.Clair said. “In our day and age, we want things at the snap of a finger, at the push of a button. But there’s one great thing about music: It doesn’t happen on a push-button basis. An orchestra has to grow like an oak tree. It takes time to grow steadily into the ground as opposed to shooting up without the right root system. And I think it will take a number of years to build that root system.”