By Sharing His Art, Conductor Finds a Way to Ease His Grief

When Pacific Symphony Orchestra conductor Carl St.Clair steps onto an Irvine stage Saturday night, barely a month into mourning the death of his 18-month-old son, he intends to project a welter of emotions, not least of them a sense of celebration.

In part, his professional ethic guided his decision to lead the orchestra so early in his bereavement for Cole Carsan St.Clair, who drowned July 26. “If I could do it, I should do it,” the orchestra’s musical director said this week in an interview.

But it is also for the music, which has helped sustain the 47-year-old in his grief. His message for orchestra members--and indeed for the musical community and the audience--is: “You do have to move forward. In that moment, I’m a professional musician also. Every musician comes to rehearsal with their own personal burdens and anguish and cares and woes,” St.Clair said. “Does it have an effect? Surely. But is it something one wears? No. You leave it at the doors and the footlights.”

Cole Carsan St.Clair, the only child of St.Clair and his wife, Susan, apparently fell into a neighbor’s swimming pool in Laguna Beach. His mother had suffered a diabetic seizure in an adjacent hot tub and was unable to help him.

At first, the Pacific Symphony announced that St.Clair, its music director since 1990, would not conduct the orchestra’s two remaining summer concerts at Irvine Meadows. About two weeks later, St.Clair decided to return for Saturday’s series finale, which is built around the music of John Williams, the composer famed for his scores to adventure films, including “Star Wars,” “Superman” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Seated at a corner table in a deserted lounge in the Center Club, a plush, members-only retreat at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, St.Clair emphasized his devotion to the music of Williams, a friend since 1985 whose work he cherishes for its optimism and its empathetic embrace of a wide swath of human experience. And he talked of how the concert will allow him to reassure and reconnect with the symphony’s musicians and audience, and to thank them for their kindness to him and his family.

St.Clair was composed, articulate and deliberate, sitting with hands folded in his lap or pressed together meditatively as he considered questions. He quietly but firmly resisted any probing into the personal realm of his and his wife’s grief, preferring to place their loss in the context of his art, and of the concert ahead.

He brightened and smiled when asked whether he would address the audience on Saturday. That, he said, will be his chance to dispel any pall that might be cast over an evening, dedicated to Cole’s memory, which he wants to be “an incredibly fun concert . . . a celebration of life through John’s music.”

His composure cracked once, for a moment, as he paused, eyes misting, while talking of the comfort he took from musical pieces that two of his friends and creative collaborators, pianist Alain Lefevre and composer Frank Ticheli, had brought him as “offerings, personal gestures” in the days after Cole’s death.

St.Clair’s return to music actually began Aug. 8, when he and his wife flew to Germany, where he had an engagement as guest conductor of the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra. He was guided by the “if I could do it, I should do it” work ethic that he says stems not from his musical schooling but his upbringing on a farm in southwest Texas.

The three concerts would open the German orchestra’s season, there would be a lot of hoopla, and he wanted, if possible, to do his part. And the programs made emotional sense: Among the pieces St.Clair would conduct were Tchaikovsky’s sorrowful Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”) and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which he hears as an expression of victorious transcendence after dire, oppressive times.

“That was a repertoire which I felt could allow me to funnel or channel or purge some of the emotions I was feeling,” St.Clair said.

Yet he was uncertain he could do it. “If this isn’t going well, or if I’m not up to it, or if [Susan] is not up to it, I’m coming home,” St.Clair said he told himself.

During an airport layover in Cincinnati, waiting for a flight to Germany (St.Clair’s ancestral home, where he frequently appears as guest conductor), husband and wife wondered if they were, indeed, up to it. “We almost turned around. Leaving had a lot of trepidation attached to it. But we resolved it the same way we’re resolving everything: We put one foot in front of the other, and go in the direction it takes you.”

Within two days of rehearsals, St.Clair realized he was ready and able to conduct again, and he telephoned Pacific Symphony executive director John E. Forsyte that he would conduct the summer season finale.

Had he missed the concert, St.Clair said, it would mean that summer patrons, many of whom don’t overlap with the symphony’s regular season audience, would not see him again until summer 2000. “They would wonder, ‘What’s going on, how’s he doing, what’s happening?’

“This would be an opportunity to signify that I’m fine, I’m doing well, and my wife is doing well. We’re both doing as well as one could possibly expect at this moment, and this would be a way to be with them again in our relationship as audience and musicians.”

St.Clair’s performances in Germany were not as charged emotionally as his return to the Pacific Symphony figures to be. Only the Dusseldorf Symphony’s management knew of his son’s death, he said; to the musicians and audience, he was simply a guest conductor sharing his art.

Words of Assurance Due for Orchestra, Audience

Orange County will be different. As he spoke Tuesday afternoon, St.Clair had not yet convened the orchestra for a rehearsal. He said he expected to begin with a few words.

“This is all new territory for everybody. We’re treading a road which is new,” he said. “Obviously I would like a few minutes with them to talk to them, to thank them and embrace them and to allow them to know how deeply felt their acts of compassion were to Susan and me and our family, how much it meant to us.”

St.Clair said he plans to allay any unsettled feelings his listeners may have on Saturday. “I’m afraid the audience is going to have some”--he sucked in his breath with a whoosh, mimicking a gasp--”I want to assure them from the very beginning that we’re very blessed and fortunate in this life. We suffered a great loss, yes, but we’re very blessed and we look forward to days ahead.”

Williams’ works will be ideal for conveying that sense of affirmation, St.Clair said. The program, which he put together more than a year ago, will begin with “Olympic Fanfare,” which Williams wrote for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

“It makes me feel as if I could probably go out and run a marathon,” St.Clair said. “It’s so powerful, it makes you feel taller, stronger, more optimistic. That’s a perfect opening paragraph. I can’t think of a more uplifting piece of music. I can’t see a better way to have my musical relationship renewed with the audience.”

The program will proceed with wonder, pomp, romance and swirling adventure from Williams’ famous scores for “Superman,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Peter Maxwell Davies’ “An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise,” a piece Williams commissioned for a turn as guest conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, will feature bagpipes from a guest soloist and a Scottish pipe band.

But before a rousing closer with Williams’ “Star Wars Suite,” St.Clair, the musicians and the audience may be united in a moment of grief with Williams’ “Theme From Schindler’s List.”

“That is a complete and total reminder of the depth and immensity of human suffering, and what the human spirit has had to endure,” St.Clair said.

He has found, in his own time of endurance, that music remained something to fall back upon, to draw comfort from.

“Music has always been a dear friend to me, and a way to get through a lot of feelings,” St.Clair said. “Many people don’t realize this, but when I auditioned here as music director [early in 1990], my father had died just a few days before, and I came here still in the father-son grieving process.

“Music has a way of allowing you to work through some deep types of feelings that words very often don’t allow.”

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* The Pacific Symphony Orchestra, “Hollywood in the Meadows,” Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8808 Irvine Center Drive. 8 p.m. $14-$57. (714) 755-5799.