Conducting Business From a Keyboard : Entremont Brings His Vienna Chamber Orchestra to the Center for a Mozart Program

Philippe Entremont doesn’t take himself too seriously, which allows him to give one of the more relaxing interviews in the classical (aka “serious”) music business.

Which is not to say that the French-born conductor and pianist, who brings his Vienna Chamber Orchestra to the Orange County Center for a Mozart program tonight, has little regard for his work. Rather, in conversation he mentions composers and orchestras as often as he mentions himself, giving due credit to those most responsible for a conductor’s success.

The interview took place recently in Entremont’s vast, high-ceilinged Vienna apartment--occupied at various times in the past by conducting legends Karl Bohm and Hans Swarowsky, the teacher of Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado. It is in a row of splendid 19th-Century buildings overlooking the greenery and great fountain of Schwarzenbergplatz, a short walk from the concert halls, opera houses and museums that constitute the city’s artistic heart.

Lean and angular yet baby-faced when he was in his 20s and burning up the world’s concert stages in the Romantic repertory, Entremont has, in his mid-50s, added considerable girth. But the lurking grin on a still-unlined face remains, imparting a perpetual naughty-urchin look. His English is tinged with--sometimes inundated by--a fragrant expressive French accent.

“I came to conducting through Mozart’s piano concertos,” he said, “directing from the keyboard. When I play the concertos, I never feel like a soloist. More one of a group of chamber players. The concertos are like chamber-music dialogues.

“I’ve never been the kind of soloist who came just to play his concerto and then run back to his hotel room. I always hung around watching the conductor. I learned by watching Ormandy, Bernstein.”

Entremont’s interest began to pay off 20 years ago when CBS Masterworks signed him to record a pair of Mozart concertos with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. As an afterthought, they asked him--a greenhorn--to conduct as well. “Perhaps they were just trying to save money,” Entremont said and burst out laughing, as he frequently does, with beguiling lack of inhibition.

In 1975, he was in Vienna again, to play the Ravel piano concertos with the Vienna Symphony in celebration of the centennial of the composer’s birth. After the concert, the manager of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra approached him and asked whether he could take over an upcoming tour, as soloist and conductor, from their ailing music director, Carlo Zecchi.

“I said, ‘Why not?’ You can only die once. I thought it was a one-shot. Anyway, I thought it worked out well.”

As it turned out, Zecchi was ready to retire in 1976, and there were plenty of applicants for the job. Entremont, however, was not among them. Still, the players voted him their first choice.

“I thought about it deeply,” he recalled with a mock frown, “for a few seconds, and I accepted the title of music director,” to which the ominous words “for life” were added in 1981.

Entremont said that becoming a conductor wasn’t as much of a fluke as some of his chroniclers suggest. His father, Jean, was after all a prominent conductor at the Strasbourg Opera.

Philippe Entremont now oversees an ensemble of 40 players, two-thirds of them involved in the current Mozart bicentennial tour, a globe-girdling affair taking in the United States, the Orient and Europe.

While the majority of the VCO players are Austrian-born, a half-dozen nationalities are represented, which can make for entertaining rehearsals, as one in Vienna’s Konzerthaus recently attested.

At the outset, Entremont was on the podium, running his band through a Mozart symphony--in English. His German remains spotty. Still, he deftly fielded a player’s question in that language about articulation, responding up to the point where Ola Rudner, the orchestra’s Swedish senior concertmaster, took over as translator.

There was input as well from the bass player, Los Angeles native Jim Rapport, and soon a babel of various German dialects, English and French was in full swing. Tolerating about a half-minute of that, Entremont thundered a resounding “ ruhig !” (quiet!) and with a flick of his baton had the orchestra in motion again.

The next work was a 20th-Century piano concerto that Entremont directed from the keyboard, as he does Mozart’s concertos.

Gestures to the players were minimal. “We are professionals who come to rehearsals, not just to concerts, prepared,” he said. “And this is our second rehearsal of the piece. If they need me all the time during the actual concert, we’re in trouble and maybe should all be doing something else for a living.”

Entremont, who has also held the music directorships of two American orchestras--the Denver Symphony (now defunct) and the New Orleans Philharmonic--since taking over the VCO, retains a busy schedule of guest appearances as pianist and conductor throughout the world, performing the Romantic repertory as frequently as the Viennese classics.

“Playing Mozart has made me a better performer of the Romantics,” he said. “Mozart is so demanding , forcing you to concentrate, to make everything just so . There’s no place to hide. Mozart proves the old saying: There’s nothing harder than playing a C-major scale.”

He is on a roll regarding recordings. In addition to recent releases as conductor and/or soloist with the VCO on the Pro Arte label, his large pianistic output from the 1970s--Chopin, Grieg, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin--is being reissued by Sony on its bargain Odyssey label, gaining it a wider audience than ever before. Next up for re-release: Stravinsky for piano and orchestra, with the composer conducting.

“I get a wonderful surprise every month when these recordings appear,” he said. “Sony never tells me they’re coming. Then I hear them, and the sound is so much better than on the LPs. Sometimes I still actually like my old performances, which is not fashionable for an artist to admit.”

Asked about the future, he ticked off the numerous stops on the VCO’s current tour, then listed engagements with other orchestras and dropped hints about “something that will happen.”

A bit of nudging and he confirmed, sotto voce , that he will soon to begin “a formal association” with the (shhhh!) Leipzig Radio Orchestra, which will give him a chance to conduct some big 20th-Century works, among them the daunting “Sinfonia” of Luciano Berio.

“You can’t believe how excited I am about that,” he said. “Almost as excited as I get when I conduct a Mozart symphony.”

The Orange County Philharmonic Society presents the Vienna Chamber Orchestra with pianist/conductor Philippe Entremont, violinist Ola Rudner and violist Ilse Wincor at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $10 to $30. Information: (714) 556-2787.