Keith Clark

Keith Clark must be feeling like the Conductor Without a Country these days. A little more than a decade ago, the ambitious young conductor and fledgling composer out of UCLA's music school traded in whatever future he might have had on the refined and cultured shores of the European continent to launch a modest orchestra in Fullerton.

Three days after narrowly voting not to extend his contract, the board of the Pacific Symphony announced Keith Clark's resignation Thursday as music director of the orchestra he founded nine years ago. The resignation, the board said, will take effect at the end of the 1988-'89 season. Board president John Evans said that Clark was not "forced out." A search committee, he said, will be formed "within a week" to find a replacement for Clark.

Keith Clark, founding music director of the Pacific Symphony, has been given "a couple of options" affecting his future with the orchestra, according to a member of the board of directors. The board held a long, closed meeting Monday night at which "votes were taken" involving its continuing relationship with Clark, board member Stewart Woodard said Tuesday. Clark's leadership has long divided the board because many feel that the orchestra has outgrown him.

Attending a concert that Keith Clark conducts can be a little like riding in a car with a driver who is lost. There is a lot of activity, but it doesn't seem to lead anywhere. Such was the dominant impression when Clark conducted the Santa Ana-based Pacific Symphony Orchestra in a program of Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Dvorak on Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Pacific Symphony conductor Keith Clark has signed a multiyear contract with the Santa Ana-based orchestra. Clark, who had worked without a contract since he founded the orchestra in 1979, said the new contract extends to the end of the 1989, with options for extensions and renewals and for expansion of the orchestra's recording activities. It is, he said Tuesday, "pretty much everything I wanted."

Pacific Symphony music director Keith Clark and the board of directors of the Santa Ana-based orchestra say they are on the verge of signing the conductor's first contract with the organization. Until now, Clark, who founded the orchestra in 1979, has worked without a contract. "I never had a formal-in-writing contract with the symphony," Clark said Friday. "A contract was mentioned occasionally over the years, but it was nothing anyone got around to doing.

Extravagant claims are made about the sonic wonder of every advance in audio technology, such as compact discs. All it takes, however, is a brilliant performance of a blockbuster like "Le Sacre du Printemps" in a lively auditorium such as Segerstrom Hall to shatter any illusions of equality between the impact of live and reproduced music.

Heroism was the undisputed subject and apparent goal of Keith Clark's latest Pacific Symphony program, performed Wednesday and Thursday nights in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. In a program listing Mozart's Overture to "Le Nozze di Figaro," the Cello Concerto by Dvorak and Richard Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben," Clark stayed on the subject and approached the goal.