The pieces of James Levine

He does not drive. He does not cook. He doesn’t do laundry. James Levine has a pair of assistants – younger brother Tom and Ken Hunt – to take care of his needs, on and offstage. They talk with musicians, meet with accountants and agents, and scout out where he will live in Boston, near Tanglewood, or anywhere else he’s working. The maestro, who goes by “Jimmy’’ or “Jim,’’ needs them. Nothing can get in the way of his music.

He is the most famous conductor of his generation, a singularly focused figure who has led the Metropolitan Opera for 33 years, landed on the cover of Time magazine, and performed with the Three Tenors. But it has taken him until his 61st birthday to realize one of his dreams. This week, he finnally gets a chance to take control of an American orchestra. With a black-tie gala and a pair of sold-out concerts, Levine marks his coronation as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 14th music director.

Just don’t expect Levine to stay at the party too late.

He’s one of the busiest men in music. He had to delay his arrival in Boston to finish his contract in Germany, where he led the Munich Philharmonic. Along with this five-year commitment to Boston, Levine has signed on to remain at the Met through 2011. His schedule at the opera house has been the stuff of legend, sometimes fi0nding him in the pit for two dozen operas over a two-month stretch. He marked his 25th year at the Met in 1996 with an eight-hour concert, broadcast live on PBS. Levine’s schedule has the BSO already cautioning: Don’t expect to see him taking in the Sox at Fenway or schmoozing the cocktail party circuit.

Johanna Fiedler, daughter of the late Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler and author of a history of the Met, “Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera,’’ says, “Music is the only thing that matters to him.’’

It's that celebrated musical intensity that the BSO is counting on. By the time Seiji Ozawa left in 2002, there was dissension within the ranks, and the BSO was dogged by a reputation for inconsistency. With Levine, the orchestra expects to reestablish the kind of excitement that hasn't existed for years. In 2001, Nicholas Zervas, head of the BSO's search committee, compared the hiring of the renowned conductor to bringing "Babe Ruth back to Boston."

Levine is not about to get caught up in the buzz. He has music to attend to. When he talks of his BSO plans, he speaks in unbroken paragraphs and without grand pronouncements.

"I'll tell you, I feel really excited," he says in a recent interview from his office at the Met. It's decorated with photos of past productions, his Grammys (tucked away on top of a bookcase), postcards, old props, and even a black and white photo of his childhood home in Cincinnati. Levine takes particular glee in pointing out a fake, overturned cup of melted Ben & Jerry's ice cream on his desk. Made of plastic, it looks as if it is creating a messy puddle. Levine says that sometimes, as a prank, he'll put the cup on a score before a meeting.

"If I'm going to do this with an American symphony orchestra, the Boston situation is the one most likely to interact effectively with me," Levine says. "The hall, the support from the community, the tradition, the strong intelligence factor where you can communicate something verbally or intellectually which everybody understands."

Does he feel he has the players he needs?

"I didn't say that," he says. "I can't say that. When I rehearse six programs and do six programs, if something isn't working, it will have begun to show itself."

With his wild, curly hair and portly profile, Levine doesn't look like a modern-day Leonard Bernstein. Live, he's certainly no Ozawa, a photogenic performer whose emotional podium style made him a favorite with the symphony crowd. Levine isn't interested in that physical approach. He's more concerned with winning over audience members his way. Through their ears.

To explain, Levine references a 1998 BSO guest spot when he conducted Haydn's "The Creation." In rehearsal, Levine took an unexpected approach with one of the well-known passages in the piece. The section comes after a hushed delivery of the words "and there was light," followed by a dramatic musical sunburst.

Usually, a conductor will wind up for this climax as if he's trying to hit a fastball onto the Mass. Pike. Not Levine. In rehearsal, he told the players they needed to learn to hit the climax on their own, without a dramatic wave of his arms. They practiced this repeatedly, until they could pull off the crash in concert with hardly a signal. That, Levine believes, is how the composer intended it.

"My mission is to work an orchestra until its responses are the maximum from the minimal gesture," he says. "So that in concert, the audience concentrates through its ears rather than having something so busy to watch."

A childhood of music
Levine's musical romance, or obsession, started just after World War II. That's when the toddler in Cincinnati could reach the wind-up arm of his parents' record player. Helen and Larry Levine (pronounced luh-VINE) weren't trying to train the next Toscanini. They just wanted to keep the boy occupied so they could sleep late. So they placed a Victrola on a table next to young Jimmy's crib. It wasn't long before the boy was taking piano lessons.

"My husband would hold him in his arms and sing him to sleep, and the next day he would get up and toddle over to the piano, still wearing those pajamas with the feet in them, and pick out the piece," says Helen Levine, who still attends many of his concerts.

At 4, James Levine played a section of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" at a recital. Soon, he was recruiting his younger siblings, Tom and Janet, to play roles in his living-room operas. By the time he turned 10, Levine had performed as a soloist with his hometown Cincinnati Orchestra. Juilliard came calling at the same time, asking that he be sent to New York immediately for intensive study. But his parents, who had already turned down a potentially profitable speaking role for a brainy, musical kid on a radio show in New York, had another idea.

"We said no, he has to learn more than how to wiggle his fingers on a piano," says his mother. "He had to learn to live in a family with his brother and sister and be able to engage with the rest of the world."

Instead of flatly refusing, Levine's father let him fly from Cincinnati to New York every other weekend for lessons. Eventually, around his 18th birthday, Levine attended Julliard, which led to his greatest opportunity. In 1964, at just 21, he was picked to be an assistant conductor to George Szell in the Cleveland Orchestra.

That's where Levine first made his mark through his programming of concerts. Szell didn't let him conduct the Cleveland Orchestra much. But he did encourage Levine to take up an offer from the local Cleveland Institute of Music to form an orchestra with players from several surrounding colleges. The University Circle Orchestra, which Levine founded in 1966, earned him the respect of the older players in the Cleveland Orchestra. The young conductor presented opera concerts with guest singers he somehow was able to recruit from institutions as prominent as the Met.

`He had a plan'
In Cleveland, an aura began to surround Levine. His style -- never short-tempered, always schooled in the score, and quick on his feet -- impressed the professional musicians hired to thicken up the student-orchestra ranks. He also taught a class, which involved no credit, grade, or specific time limit. It might go on for two hours, or four if he so desired.

"It was called conducting, but no one ever got up and waved their arms," remembers Michael Ouzounian, who would go on to become first viola at the Met. "It was a class that taught you how to study a piece of music. He would say, `You know your name, don't you? That's how you have to know the piece.' "

Through his teaching, Levine developed what some observers described as a kind of cult of student admirers. They followed him around, scores tucked under their arms. They wore matching desert boots. Older members of the Cleveland Orchestra began to refer to them as "the Levinites."

"They worshiped the ground he walked on, he was like a god to them," says Larry Angel, principal bassist in the Cleveland Orchestra from 1955 to 1995. "You knew he had a plan of some kind, and he was not going to spend his career as an assistant conductor. I would hear all the time, `When Jimmy gets his orchestra.' That did not mean the Erie Philharmonic."

No, it meant the Met, which hired Levine as its principal conductor in 1973. When he arrived, the Met had no full-time music director, just a rotating cast of conductors to lead the operas. Before long, Levine would be a fixture, changing the way the world's premiere opera house worked and making himself indispensible along the way.

At the Met, Levine developed his reputation as an orchestra builder. His mammoth performance schedule left little time for anything else.

"When Jimmy first came, the quality was not what it is today," says Joseph Volpe, the general manager who has worked in some capacity at the Met since 1964. "Nobody really paid attention to the orchestra. There were lots of guest conductors, and nobody on board day in and day out. So for many years, you had good times and bad times."

Levine built the Met by plotting out programs years in advance. His soft, personal touch played well with some of the world's greatest singers. He also found willing partners in Volpe, Hunt, and his brother Tom. They sheltered him from confrontation -- "although Jimmy doesn't have a reputation for enjoying a good fight, I do," said Volpe -- and protected his time so he could devote himself fully to his music.

Hunt and Tom Levine became the best line of defense for a man who never wants to be rude or appear disinterested.

"If it's somebody who is an overaged, clapped-out singer who says, `We really need to have a meeting about what I'm going to be doing at the Met in future years,' he's not going to say no," says Tom Levine. "It's just rude and not friendly. And so he may call me, and I'll say, `Jeez, I don't know where we're going to put this."

Levine takes great pride in his ability to get the best out of players. He believes in collaboration, and he gives his orchestras more responsibility than is standard in auditioning players. In Boston, he's not always been present for auditions since his appointment in 2001. Levine says he trusts the orchestra. He also doesn't believe he can really know if a player's right until he or she has played for him a while. If, at that point, he doesn't like the orchestra's choice, there's a two-year probationary period during which he can let the player go before granting tenure.

At the Met, Levine developed his emphasis on rehearsals and longevity. He has stayed so long because he feels he's most effective when he has an understanding with his players that only comes with time. That's also, in part, why he remained music director at the Ravinia Festival, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's summer home, for 20 years, until 1993.

"I want to hear the orchestra play the way a great singer, a great piano soloist, a great string quartet plays," he says. "I want them to have the communicative power to transmit the composer's idea. Therefore I regard my work as done 80, 90 percent in rehearsals."

Over time, some Met players say, that's created a special level of communication between the conductor and the orchestra. With his musicians so well prepared, Levine doesn't have to employ the bombast and arm-waving expected from the average conductor. He can signal the players with the slightest move of his finger. He can use his right arm to keep the beat.

"You see so many conductors with their heads buried in the score and not really giving you the impression that they know what's going on and that they are really communicating with everyone," says Richard Horowitz, timpanist in the Met Orchestra for more than 50 years. "There's no problem like that with Jimmy."

A new relationship
Levine's ability to shape an orchestra without making wholesale changes will be important in Boston. Ozawa had 29 years to supervise additions to the BSO. Of the 95 players entering the 2004-2005 season, he appointed 72. Still, long before Ozawa left two years ago, his relationship had soured with some prominent players.

Back in 1995, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe and principal cellist Jules Eskin savaged Ozawa in an independent newsletter published by a group of players, suggesting he should be replaced.

"I found it thrilling to work with Seiji," says James Sommerville, the BSO's principal horn since 1998. "But it's true that most relationships like this need a change at a certain point."

"Here's what I hope will happen," starts Levine.

He sips from a mug of iced Evian. Earlier in the day, he led a rehearsal of "The Magic Flute," the new Julie Taymor production. Now he's explaining why he isn't nervous about his Boston debut.

"We hope if I work with them for two or three seasons, that we start to know each other in a way where the rehearsal time goes further and further because they know what it is we're after. If I stop the Met orchestra in a rehearsal, if I were to stop them and before I said a word and said, `How many of you know what I'm going to critique?' 99 percent of them would know."

He scared everyone last year. There were a pair of canceled engagements in Munich -- one in January, another in June. Levine also begged out of a few Met productions, feeling he'd be pushing himself too much. An article about his health -- voicing concerns from unnamed Met players -- appeared on the front page of The New York Times in May. Placido Domingo, reading in Europe, was just one of many opera figures who called to see if he was OK.

So this fall, as Tom Levine looked at his brother's increasingly busy schedule for Boston, he suddenly got nervous. Never mind the rehearsals and performances. There were seminars and open houses, patron events and post-concert parties. Tom Levine dashed an e-mail off to BSO managing director Mark Volpe. Please, don't book anything else until you talk with us, he wrote. Volpe had no problem with that. He's been on the phone with Joseph Volpe (no relation) and Levine's agent, Ronald Wilford, to make sure Levine works enough downtime into his schedule.

"Look, it would do Jimmy some good to lose some weight," says Joseph Volpe. "Does Jimmy have the energy he had 30 years ago? Of course he doesn't. Who does? But if Jimmy works his schedule carefully and takes appropriate breaks, he'll have as much energy and gusto as he's always had."

As a concession to his health, Levine did take a full month off before this season as opposed to his usual two weeks. Staying in Europe, he swam and walked. Back in the States, he has made adjustments.

He's decided to sit during symphony performances because it's easier on his back. He has largely stopped rehearsing with the ubiquitous towel draped over his shoulder. After his latest bout with sciatica, he decided he was creating strain with the towel, which he used to wipe sweat and protect him from drafts during rehearsal.

What he won't promise is that he'll cut down on his music.

"When you work as a performing musician, and you study scores and you work with live composers, you do your best to bring every fiber of perception to the work of no longer alive composers, you don't have much time for standard stuff," Levine says. "I get tired of people implying that to live your live that way is some sort of oddity." The BSO, under James Levine, performs Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" at sold-out shows Friday and Saturday.