Among composers who look nothing like the way their music sounds, Oliver Knussen must take some sort of prize.
For decades, the English composer and conductor, who makes his first appearance with the San Francisco Symphony beginning this afternoon, has written concise, impeccably organized scores marked by intricate precision, color and a hint of whimsy.
Only that last quality seems to carry over into his personal demeanor. Bearded, toweringly tall and nearly as large around, Knussen, 53, lumbers into a room like a slightly disoriented bear. He looks as if he'd just as soon as be eating honey from a crockery jar as writing one of his fastidious musical miniatures.
But get Knussen onto the subject of music -- anything from Bach to Britten to Elliott Carter to his own work -- and the observations and reflections flow easily. Clearly, this is the emotional center of Knussen's being, just as it has been since he burst onto the London scene as a teenage composing and conducting prodigy.
It was through that shared passion that he first forged a friendship with the slightly older Michael Tilson Thomas a few years later when they were Tanglewood students.
"We discovered that we knew all kinds of weird music that no one else knew and could hum it to each other," Knussen recalled with a grin. "We both knew Britten's 'Prince of the Pagodas' backwards and forwards, or late Stravinsky. We used to bore everybody at the lunch tables."
His Symphony program this week, which he describes as the outcome of "the usual struggle between stuff you suggest and stuff people will want to hear," reflects some of the same enthusiasms, including the music of Britten and Stravinsky. Those are his "party pieces," he says, music he felt comfortable conducting with an orchestra for the first time.
But then came the belated realization that there was nothing on the program by Knussen himself. So he added "The Way to Castle Yonder," a characteristically brief orchestral suite drawn from his one-act opera "Higglety Pigglety Pop!"
Together with "Where the Wild Things Are," "Higglety Pigglety Pop!" forms a evening-long pair of one-acts based on the children's classics by Maurice Sendak (Los Angeles Opera gave the double bill its U.S. premiere in 1990). The collaboration with Sendak, brokered by a mutual friend at Tanglewood, began with an impromptu compatibility test.
"I was too old to have grown up with Sendak's books," Knussen said, "but they interested me. Then one day the phone rings and this very shy voice comes on.
" 'This is Maurice Sendak. Can we just start by me asking you what you think is the best children's opera ever written?' I said, 'The second act of "Boris Godunov." ' He said, 'Right answer,' and from that point on we became very close."
Knussen came to music very early. His father was the principal double-bass player for the London Symphony Orchestra, and young Olly wrote his First Symphony at 14, conducting it with the LSO the next year.
That precocious premiere became the stuff of legend, but Knussen speaks dismissively of the piece today.
"It's very remarkable that a kid of 14 wrote it, but really that's all. It's not a major addition to the repertoire. Every once in a while I dig out the one extant recording to listen to it, but it's never performed."
The first pieces he acknowledges were written when he was around 19. "They've got something -- it's quite brash and loud, and very bold. Then after that the pieces got quieter, but the boldness was just internalized. And the first piece in which those two worlds came together was the Third Symphony, which I wrote for Michael Thomas."
Like Britten before him, Knussen has been an active educator and promoter of young musicians in Britain, including 15 years as an artistic director at the Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten helped create. Since 1990, he has lived in the small Suffolk town of Snape, just 5 miles inland from Aldeburgh, where he and composer Colin Matthews run a summer course in contemporary composition and performance.
Knussen continues to compose -- most recently a still-unfinished work for the Cleveland Orchestra based on paintings in the Cleveland Art Museum -- but he does so slowly and with evident difficulty. Those habits have left him with a notorious reputation for missing deadlines, a reputation he acknowledges with a rueful shrug.
There are two reasons for that. "One is simply that I don't like working to deadlines -- although if I didn't have a deadline I'd probably never start. A piece wants to be what it wants to be, and the few times I've forced it to be something else to meet a deadline, I've regretted it. Plus there's the experience having music played in public that you're later embarrassed by."
More important, though, is Knussen's conscientiousness about music history.
"In the last 15 years I think the quality of what one writes is critical because we're trying to build bridges back to the audience which we've lost. That's a good thing, but it can also involve throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
"There are a lot of things that audiences find very difficult, from the Second Viennese School right up to Stockhausen, and a lot of lessons to be learned from that music that shouldn't be chucked out.
"The richest tonal music being written today -- which is by John Adams, David Del Tredici and others -- is by composers with the most sophisticated awareness of what preceded them. They have worked through that in a very rigorous way, and I would like to think I have been similarly rigorous in working through the things that have made me what I am today -- the architectural aspect of Britten's music, or the detailing and formal structure in a composer like Berg, or the unbelievable careful patterning in Ligeti and Boulez."