'Jazz taught me to go after the basics: rhythm, intonation, balance, dynamics. And sound. This striving for sound has remained with me'

Libor Pesek began by playing jazz in Prague. Then he moved to Britain, becoming a classical-music treasure. Arminta Wallace reports

The new Europe is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but in many ways, as far as the world of classical music is concerned, the new Europe is actually the old Europe. It's nothing new to find that musicians have drifted westwards - or, less commonly, eastwards - and settled somewhere unlikely, often becoming household names in the process.

Libor Pesek is a case in point. Having worked as principal conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for more than a decade, he is practically a national treasure in the UK. He is in possession of a beautifully modulated brand of spoken English and a KBE - Knight of the British Empire to you and me. His official 70th-birthday celebrations last year almost blew the roof off Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall, and his recordings of the Dvorák symphonies for Virgin Classics have attained the enviable status of much-loved best-sellers.

Yet he began his musical life at the helm of a big band - the swing kind, not the orchestral kind - in Prague. From Prague to Liverpool? In the classical pecking order it carries a hint of the sublime to the ridiculous. Not that it bothers Maestro Pesek, who, while settling in to a chair in the foyer of a Belfast hotel, effortlessly springs to the defence of his adopted musical home. "Oh. Well," he says, with precisely the right amount of understated English insouciance, "the Liverpool orchestra is the oldest in Britain. It was 150 years old when I came there. And it has had some very remarkable names in its history, commencing with a conductor by the name of Mendelssohn."

Dressed from head to foot in conductorly black for a morning rehearsal with the Ulster Orchestra at the Waterfront Hall, Pesek is the model of a mittel-European maestro. In conversation, however, he exudes a heady blend of easy-going charm and disarming frankness. How did he come to be conducting the orchestra in the first place? Well, he had been engaged for some guest spots with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Naturally, he was asked to suggest some programmes of Czech music. One of his suggestions was the lengthy and challenging Asrael symphony, by Josef Suk, which was politely rejected on the grounds that it might drive bums off seats in droves. "At the same time the chief of the BBC in Manchester heard about this crazy Czech conductor who wanted to do this work, and he said, well, why not in Liverpool?"

The response was uniformly positive. "Within one week I was offered the position as principal conductor. In a funny way, I hesitated. I had been for 10 years in Holland, and I wasn't very happy to be a chief conductor in a foreign country with a foreign orchestra. But . . . " He shrugs an elegant mittel-European shrug. "It worked. That's all."

But that, of course, is far from all. There are two kinds of conductor in classical music: the kind who jets in, shouts a lot and jets out again and the kind who stays put for a decade or more. The guest conductor can be a pain in the ass or a breath of fresh air. The permanent conductor can be an inspiration or just part of the wallpaper. To get the balance right is tricky, but Pesek says his time in Liverpool was immensely rewarding. "My predecessors had left the orchestra in good technical shape; what it needed was someone to look after it in the longer term," he says. "Educating an orchestra to your way of musical thinking is a constant process. The pressure has to be mild, smooth, but constant. This is what takes time."

And his way of musical thinking is. . . . Can he define it? He grins his mischievous grin. "Before being engaged I was asked the question, 'What would you change?' I said that I would like the orchestra to have a sound which you could recognise. Of course, it's a bit of rubbish, because there are so many orchestras. But, let's say, it sounds well. After two or three seasons the press began to say the Liverpool orchestra was the best Czech-sounding orchestra outside the Czech Republic.

"And - funny thing - I also thought that it would be wonderful not to change anything, because I love the English sound. The English way of playing is very elegant. So I was hoping not to change much. But it happened spontaneously. You have things built in to your ears, and somehow they promote change without even willing it to happen."

Mostly, the things that were built in to Pesek's ears were the legacy of his two earliest musical enthusiasms: jazz and chamber music. "The jazz scene in Prague was of a very high quality. Even before the war we had some composers who were on the level of Benny Goodman and the rest, and during the war it stayed that way, though there was no dancing then, of course. We had some very good individuals - though I wasn't among them."

Modesty, maestro, surely? He looks alarmed. "No, no, I really mean that," he insists. "That's honest, not modest. But what jazz taught me was to go after, first of all, the basics: rhythm, intonation, balance, dynamics. And sound. This longing, this striving for sound has remained with me for the rest of my musical life."

Working with chamber orchestras, meanwhile, added another layer of awareness that had to do with attention to detail. "The symphonic world asks you to be more a designer of the big line than to be a meticulous craftsman. But you somehow carry all the past experience with you, and you use it whenever you see an opportunity - and there are moments, even in the 'big line' music, when you can say to your colleagues in the orchestra: Now is the time to make this better. This always appeals to the best in the musicians. They understand, and they react."

But why did he switch from jazz to classical music? He launches into a sentence of explanation, stops, thinks. Starts again. Finally, he laughs. "This is a question," he says, "which I should answer for myself one day." We have strayed, it turns out, not just in to difficult musical territory but also in to difficult philosophical territory. "I'm speaking to people about myself all the time. But I was just thinking about this the other day. Being a Buddhist, how can I tell people who I am, or what I am, if I doubt my own existence?"

The fact that Pesek has been a Buddhist for nigh on 40 years does not, needless to say, figure on his strictly po-faced classical CV, although it probably says more about him than any amount of detail about how many US orchestras he has conducted over the years.

"But," he adds, "I'm not a practising anything. I take Buddhism as my world view, not as a religion. Not that Buddhism is a religion." It is, he says, more of a balancing act. It demands detachment from worldly concerns, but not the sort of detachment that strays into indifference towards other people.

"The two main points about Buddhism is that, first, you start to doubt your own existence, because you understand that you are projecting yourself, that objective reality is without qualities, and your qualities are simply projected in to your perception of reality. That's the first point. And the second is caring for others, because others are simply suffering, as you are."

Hence Pesek's affection for the music of Suk, with its emphasis on being in harmony with nature and with one's surroundings. "What is so near to my heart in Suk's music is the melancholy, the appreciation of the Czech countryside and its message, because the countryside is mild, nothing dramatic. People usually practise a philosophy which is delivered by religion or by some outside force, but Suk developed his own private thing, which I hear in the music: acceptance of the good and the bad in life and in nature. Nature can be cruel but also very kind. So it is in life. We are lucky or unlucky, without any merit. Statistics is the language God speaks to us."

A pity, then, that we won't hear any Suk when Pesek visits the National Concert Hall in Dublin tomorrow on his tour with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The programme features Dvorák's Cello Concerto, Holst's suite The Planets, and Harmonielehre Part I by the US composer John Adams - a combination about which Pesek is typically forthright. "I would never have chosen the Adams piece. It was proposed to me, as was the rest of the programme, by my management. Having accepted it, I'm surprised by how interesting it is. But it's bloody difficult. Musical, yes, but difficult. The cello concerto, of course, is the daily bread to Czech musicians, and I love it, because it's more than just an accompaniment, it's a symphonic performance. The orchestra has so much to say there."

And The Planets - about as Czech as it gets? Pesek sighs, then smiles a conspiratorial smile. "I will confess that, having been for 11 years an English conductor, I didn't ever conduct The Planets. I'll tell you why. I always found it a little bit . . . depictive." Unsubtle, in other words? He laughs. "It doesn't have any depth, but there's music in it. It has the right pomp, and the Jupiter part of it. . . . Jupiter, by the way, is my planet." He beams. "The joyous planet." Now why does that not surprise me?

Libor Pesek and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, with Jiri Barta on cello, play at the National Concert Hall in Dublin tomorrow