With new leader, symphony in good health

Jonathan McPhee has held one of the city's most important musical jobs since 1988, music director of the Boston Ballet. But by definition it's also a low-profile job: He works in the pit, and the audience gets to see him full-length only when he comes onstage at evening's end.

McPhee also holds a big position on the North Shore, where he serves as music director of Symphony by the Sea in Marblehead. And now he's taken on a third local job as leader of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra; he makes his debut as its music director Saturday night in Jordan Hall.

The Longwood Symphony, founded in 1982, is a remarkable institution that isn't as well known as it ought to be, and that's something McPhee wants to change. It is an amateur orchestra, and most of the players are members of Boston's large healthcare community: doctors, nurses, researchers, technicians, administrators. McPhee is struck by the paradox that the Longwood Symphony may be the only place where many of the area's hospitals have representatives who meet and work together on a regular basis.

The organization has a unique business model. ''The doctors have always paid dues to be part of the orchestra," McPhee said, ''and the institution has performed miracles on no money at all. One of its primary purposes is to generate funds for other organizations."

All four Longwood concerts in Jordan Hall each season are benefits for health-related nonprofits, and over the last dozen years the orchestra has raised more than $500,000 for 25 worthy causes and underserved populations. Saturday night's concert, for example, is a benefit for the Massachusetts Consortium for Children With Special Health Care Needs.

This business model has some consequences for artistic development. ''This gives the group some interesting musical options," McPhee said. ''Most organizations have to balance concerns about fund-raising and building an audience and playing what people want to hear with what the performers want to play or should be playing. As a result, the same pieces keep turning up on programs over and over again."

The Longwood Symphony doesn't sell most of the tickets to its concerts itself; marketing becomes the job of the organization for which each concert is a benefit. The orchestra is therefore in a position ''to explore repertory as unique as its mission," McPhee said. ''This season, for example, we will play Prokofiev's 'Scythian Suite,' a wonderful piece I have been dying to do for years but which is a hard sell in other circumstances because nobody knows it." McPhee's program Saturday does have Tchaikovsky's ''Pathetique" Symphony, but it also has Walton's less-often-played ''Crown Imperial." The orchestra also often features young locallybased soloists. Saturday's choice is violinist Ayano Ninomiya, who plays Wieniawski's dazzling Second Concerto instead of one of the more familiar standards.

McPhee has worked in the background with the Longwood Symphony for about a dozen years, guest conducting for predecessor Francisco Noya and consulting. ''I accepted the invitation as music director because I am sold on the group and its mission," he said.

Dr. Lisa Wong is president of the symphony and a violinist in the orchestra. ''I have also played viola," she said, ''but this year we had a bumper crop of 17 violists, so I am a violinist again." She says there was not much of a search process; everyone wanted McPhee, and the offer lined up with a time in his life when he wants to travel less.

''Jonathan's musical mind has already taken us to a different level," said Wong, a Massachusetts General Hospital pediatrician with a private office in Milton. She said the orchestra is at the point that players are taking lessons again, buying new instruments, practicing at home. Five of the new members this seasons are interns, who are on call constantly but who make time for the orchestra ''because they have to."

An unexpected benefit for the orchestra has been McPhee's administrative expertise; he was the human glue that held the Boston Ballet together in more than one period of crisis. Wong believes McPhee can help take the Longwood Symphony from its adolescence to ''a more adult state."

''Nonprofits begin in someone's kitchen where people lick and stamp envelopes," she said. ''Then you have to move on to strategic planning, to creating an office and hiring an administrator, then launching an annual appeal. In that sense, the Longwood Symphony is still a virtual organization, and its office is e-mail."

The new music director has no qualms about the quality of the orchestra. He called it ''100 percent amateur, in the best sense of the word," but said some of the players could very well have become professional musicians.

''My hope is that the qualitative line between amateur and professional will become increasingly blurred, and that music lovers will want to come and buy the seats in the house that have not been allocated to the benefit simply because of the chance to hear music they won't hear anyplace else," he said. ''The stronger we get, the more we can do for the causes we want to support."