Confessions of a Talented Workaholic : The grueling schedule Gerard Schwarz sets for himself as Seattle Symphony music director can’t dampen his enthusiasm

SEATTLE —  Gerard Schwarz is a workaholic. Luckily, he happens to be an immensely talented workaholic.

Even luckier, he is young. As conductors go, 42 is still young. He also is strong and preposterously, not to mention disarmingly, enthusiastic.

The public has embraced him proudly in the cultural capital of the Pacific Northwest. The admiration, he gushes without much prodding, is emphatically mutual.

Watch him run. Watch him run upward.

Take, for example, the impossible schedule he set for himself between Oct. 28 and Nov. 8 this year. During this brief and not altogether atypical period, he led the Seattle Symphony-- his Seattle Symphony--in four extraordinarily demanding concerts, one pair dominated by heavyweight works of Rachmaninoff and Bartok, the other pair devoted to daunting challenges of Beethoven and Mahler. Each program, moreover, included a difficult contemporary piece as an almost obligatory overture.

When he wasn’t busy on the stage, he was busy in the pit, leading the Seattle Opera six times through the four-hour Mozartian marathon known as “Le Nozze di Figaro.” He doesn’t happen to like cuts.

He officiated at 10 performances in 12 days. Between performances, he oversaw rehearsals, called meetings, attended de rigueur receptions, made dutiful public appearances, met for post-mortems with individual orchestra players, participated in planning sessions, finalized some recording projects and even endured interrogation from the press.

He did all this with illumination and patient grace. Under such trying circumstances, he would have had every right to be flustered, harried, nervous, short-tempered, cantankerous, hasty, arbitrary, unpleasant, uncooperative, or all of the above. Instead, he spread calm, bonhomie and cheer where’er he talked. The aura of self-inflicted pleasure remained remarkably convincing.

“My secret is simple,” he confessed in dulcet New York-tinged tones over coffee in his split-level apartment on the waterfront. “I am compulsive. I love music. I love what I am doing.

“I happen to have tonight off, but I’d rather be conducting ‘Figaro.’ ”

He did betray one sign of stress during his travails. When he took his bows, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a shower wearing white tie and tails. If the old bromide is true about success depending even more on perspiration than on inspiration, Gerard Schwarz must be one of the most successful maestros in the world.

It is Monday night at the Seattle Opera House, ergo Symphony night. Because the 3,000-seat hall must be shared with the local opera company, the ballet and visiting attractions, the regular subscription nights for the orchestra in this city are irregular: Mondays and Tuesdays. That might change when and if the orchestra gets its wish for a home of its own in a year or two, probably a renovated movie palace.

The house is nearly full. A management representative points out that the orchestra sold 93% of its tickets last year. Enthusiasm runs high.

The Seattle Symphony has been giving concerts in one form or another for 84 years. Nevertheless, the audience doesn’t seem to take it for granted. Not, at any rate, when the vital and eager music director is on the podium.

For symphonic throat-clearing and good relations with the let’s-pretend modernists on the scene, Schwarz programs Jonathan Kramer’s “No Beginning, No End.” Written in 1983 and first performed by the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, it turns out to be a very earnest endeavor (the text is by Peretz Markish, a Jewish victim of the Stalinist purge). Unfortunately, its noble socio-poetic intentions are compromised by the composer’s neo-romantic banalities, not to mention an upstage chorus that, despite amplification, evaporates in the acoustical morass.

Undaunted, Schwarz conducts as if lives were at stake. His orchestra responds with bravura strength and rousing fervor. The ensemble sound is terrific.

Next comes Beethoven’s Fifth, in a performance apparently more concerned with heroism than with introspection. Some rough edges remind us that this is not the Philadelphia Orchestra. But the Philadelphia Orchestra doesn’t invariably ride old warhorses with such gusto.

Most conductors would make the Fifth the climax of the evening. Schwarz returns after intermission with the exotic, mercurial, ultimately overpowering Weltschmerz of Mahler’s “Lied von der Erde.” He trusts his audience enough to end an evening with the hush of eternal yearning. Ewig ... Ewig . . . .

It is a warm, sensitive performance. Schwarz, who has attempted the work only once before, avoids the traps of bombast at one extreme and preciousness at the other. The orchestra plays with flexibility predicated on solid middle-ground values. It roars and whispers only when necessary. The tone is even, the focus on inner voices sometimes astonishing, the balance between instruments and voices as reasonable as unreasonable Mahler will allow.

Melvyn Poll sings the strenuous tenor solos valiantly. Dale Duesing, otherwise occupied as Mozart’s Figaro, sings the baritone solos (solos more frequently entrusted to a mezzo-soprano) with taste, intelligence and, if anything, too much understatement. That, of course, is preferable to overstatement of any degree.

The listener was tired the next morning. The conductor wasn’t.

“I know the program was a little crazy,” he admitted, “but I liked it.”

He responded to all questions with gee-whiz eagerness that seemed almost too good to be true. However, Gerard Schwarz oozes bona fide sincerity. He may just be the happiest music director since Carlo Maria Giulini.

“What’s right here?” he was asked.

He echoed the question, and smiled. “Everything is right here. Seattle is a miracle for me.”

Realizing that he sounded just a tiny bit like a podium Pollyanna, he added some qualification. “Of course there are problems. We desperately need a new concert hall. We don’t even have offices in the building where we play. We can’t play weekends. We are a poor, very penny-conscious organization. There is no fat. Our budget is small. Maybe $8 1/2 million, not including the opera. Everyone has to work hard as hell.”

Then the minor mode reverted to major. “This isn’t my orchestra. It is their orchestra. It is our orchestra. That makes the difference.

“This is an orchestra that loves to play. They really care. They get upset if they don’t rehearse enough. They want it to be great. I want to create an environment for them.

“I hope that the environment that exists here can continue. A guy gets in and does his job. People respect him for that. When will it stop? I hope it doesn’t. I worry about that. We’ve worked very hard, and we have been very lucky.

“Where do I want to be in five years? Right where I am.” He laughed. “But I hope I’ll be a better conductor than I am now.”

Did he protest too much?

He rejected the idea. “You see, I am not in this to build a career. That’s not what it is about. I am obsessive. I work hard. I am driven for excellence. This is the right environment for that. If I do the right things here, under the right conditions, the career will take care of itself.

“I don’t worry about being famous. I don’t dream about New York or Chicago. I want to make music.”

Was he getting offers from the elite American orchestras? He shook his head candidly.

Did he care?

“A little bit. Not much. I don’t lose sleep over this, though. Someday, I’m sure. . . .” His voice executed a neat decrescendo.

Wasn’t he pining to make guest appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic or at the Bayreuth Festival?

“I don’t think in those terms. If they asked for me, of course I would try to accept. They don’t seem to be asking at the moment, and I can’t leave here for long periods anyway.”

He does leave to accept invitations from such institutions as the Bamberg Symphony, the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra and, this winter, the Moscow Philharmonic. He is a founding spirit at the Waterloo Festival in New Jersey. He still conducts the Mostly Mozart concerts at Lincoln Center, and he runs the New York Chamber Symphony. He makes a lot of prize-winning recordings, mostly on the enterprising Delos label--a label that emanates from Los Angeles.

Someone called Schwarz a Seattle cult figure. He instantly rejected the idea.

“No, I’m not the type.”

That rang true. He seems too normal.

“I’m just a leader,” he expanded. “Every city needs leaders. That’s absolutely crucial. That’s why New York (where Zubin Mehta leads the Philharmonic) is in so much trouble. They don’t have anyone to rally around.

“You have to have leaders. That’s what I am. I stick my neck out.”

He first stuck his neck out in Seattle in 1983, and officially assumed full-time leadership two seasons later.

“The Seattle Symphony is only as good,” he philosophized, “as people perceive it to be. The perception of the outside world is slowly changing. No matter how well we play at home, it takes time to create an inviting image.

“We have trouble getting glamorous guest-conductors to come here, and to come often. Guest conductors are a problem. Try getting Andre Previn. He won’t come. The distance isn’t the problem. We have no trouble getting famous soloists. It is the perception of Seattle that is still a problem. . . .

“One bad guest conductor can destroy the intonation of an orchestra. We are building special relationships with certain conductors who may not have the biggest names in the business, but who appreciate what we can do and who have something to give.”

He also uses guests fill some obvious gaps. “I don’t like minimalism. I don’t like the idiom. That doesn’t mean I think our audience shouldn’t be exposed to it, so I let someone else do it.”

Schwarz is not one of those music directors seen by the community at large only when he happens to be waving a stick. He goes out there, presses flesh, helps get the modest coffers filled.

“I am a social person,” he explained. “I love people. My friends happen to be the people who contribute to the Symphony. What came first, their being contributors or friends? I don’t know anymore.”

He used to employ a high-pow

ered personal press agent in New York.

“That is over now. I want to represent myself. It is a complicated thing. We all need P.R., I think. In a better world, none of us would need it. I wanted more control of my own life. I don’t have an accountant any more, either.”

Schwarz began his musical career not in front of an orchestra but in it. He was a virtuoso trumpeter, and for many years a stalwart in the ranks of the New York Philharmonic.

“I lived in an orchestra,” he said. “I know what it is like to be played with, to not feel like you know what is going on. I don’t think I’ll make those mistakes here.”

Nor, from most reports, did he make them when he was music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from 1978 to 1986.

He left Los Angeles in order to pursue the large-scale orchestral repertory. “Although it was sad,” he said, “I had to leave. It was time.”

He said that he would have been willing to serve occasionally as a guest. He still ponders the mysterious circumstances that precluded that.

“At first I thought coming back would be a bad idea. When they made inquiries, I said I was willing to come back, even though the orchestra changed its performing style and repertory. That part was reasonable. They had a different director. They wanted to create their own niche, and not to compete with the Philharmonic.

“My agent quoted them my usual fee. They said it was too high. When I heard this, I told my agent that the money really wasn’t important, that she should tell them I would come for nothing. I said that to the board president myself.

“Then they changed their mind. They wouldn’t have me. I don’t know what happened. I was upset that they treated me that way. I won’t go back, ever.”

Representatives of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra offered oddly conflicting explanations for their failure to engage Schwarz as a guest conductor. Searching for the truth in this instance invokes unhappy visions of “Rashomon.”

It is clear that the management of the chamber orchestra was split in opposing camps when Schwarz left. One group wanted to continue along the quasi-symphonic lines he had defined, possibly with Yehudi Menuhin at the helm. The other faction, ultimately victorious, wanted to return to Baroque basics under Iona Brown.

Ronald S. Rosen, who was president of the board of directors at the time of Schwarz’s resignation and currently serves as chairman, confirmed much of the conductor’s interpretation of events. Rosen denied, however, that Schwarz offered to reduce or even forego his fee. “I just dropped it,” he recalled.

Wesley Brustad, who managed the orchestra at the time (and now serves in a similar capacity for the San Diego Symphony), claimed that he could not remember the details of the situation. That could be a case of diplomatic non-recollection.

Morton B. Jackson, who headed the board when Schwarz was first engaged and who still was a member at the time of his departure, insisted that the door was slammed in the conductor’s face. “Gerry’s story is absolutely true,” he said.

“He was deliberately cut out. The excuse was, ‘The fee is too high,’ and there was no further conversation.”

When asked about Schwarz’s purported offer to conduct for a lower fee or for no fee at all, Deborah Rutter, the current executive director, was emphatic. “I have never heard that story,” she stated.

Actually, Schwarz will come home again next year, but not to anything resembling an intimate locale or a chamber ensemble. He will lead the full Seattle Symphony in three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, taking over the midsummer slot previously occupied by the Montreal Symphony.

“I had been invited to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a regular concert at the Bowl once,” he recalled. “I turned it down when I learned it would be a fireworks program. No, thank you.”

He toured Southern California with the Seattle Symphony briefly last year. He found the new arts center in Palm Springs “potentially a fine house.” All it needed, he felt, was an orchestral shell.

“In fact, they bought ours,” he grins. “I don’t know if it works. We haven’t been back.”

Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa?

“The sound was erratic. What one heard depended on where one sat. Still, I like the feel of the house, and I like the people there.”

Time for geographical musing. “In general, I have fond memories of Los Angeles. L.A. gave me an opportunity to conduct a wonderful orchestra. L.A. introduced me to Delos Records. I worked closely there with Ed Birdwell.”

Birdwell, a longtime friend and most trusted collaborator, had played horn to Schwarz’s trumpet in the American Brass Quintet. Later he directed the music program for the National Endowment for the Arts, served as orchestra manager of the Boston Symphony and functioned as Schwarz’s executive alter ego with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Now he is executive vice president and managing director of the Seattle Symphony. Schwarz volunteered that Birdwell is “an even better orchestra manager than Ernest Fleischmann.”

Angelenos in certain quarters like to think that the local stint was Schwarz’s springboard to fame and fortune. He wouldn’t second that motion.

“I don’t think Los Angeles did anything special for my career,” he insisted. “It was nice. I had a wonderful time. The people were wonderful. I loved it. But it was not”--he stresses the negative--”a crucial stepping stone.”

“I don’t want to be a specialist,” Schwarz said when asked about his repertory. “Everyone wants you to be one. I don’t want it.”

What did he think he did best?

No answer. What did he think he did worst?

A long, uncomfortable pause.

“I just give concerts.”