Clark began with the orchestra in his home kitchen in Fullerton, California with a grant of $2,000 and personal appeals to local musicians.
In 1983, the orchestra moved its concerts to the Santa Ana High School auditorium, made its first recording, and hired a full-time manager.
[4] In 1986, the orchestra became one of the resident companies at the new Orange County Performing Arts Center and gave its first concerts there in October of that same year.
However, the Center eventually relented and granted the Pacific Symphony – as well as other regional arts organizations – residency, largely due to Clark's continued lobbying efforts.
James Chute, writing in The Orange County Register, described the situation: The standard of a respectable Clark performance seemed to be that he was prepared and that he didn't get lost.
As part of the terms of his resignation, he was given nine months of severance pay and he still maintained the power to hire and fire musicians at his sole discretion.
Some established conductors, including: Lawrence Foster, Sergiu Comissiona, Zdeněk Mácal, and Stuart Challender, were considered along with lesser known names, such as Christopher Seaman, Richard Buckley, Vakhtang Jordania, Toshiyuki Shimada, and Carl St.Clair.
[9] The board originally wanted a strong musician that would also be willing to spend significant time with the greater Orange County community.
But my wife and I had gotten so excited about the possibility that we were considering moving back to the United States in a couple of years, to New York, so we could be midway between Southern California and Europe.
The move came on the heels of the landmark 2005–06 season that included St.Clair leading the Symphony on its first European tour—nine cities in three countries playing before capacity houses and receiving extraordinary responses and reviews.
From 2008 to 2010, St.Clair was general music director for the Komische Oper Berlin, where he led successful new productions such as La traviata (directed by Hans Neuenfels).
He was the first non-European to hold this position at that theatre; the role also gave him the distinction of simultaneously leading one of the newest orchestras in America and one of the oldest in Europe.
He has also appeared with orchestras in Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South America, and summer festivals worldwide.
In North America, St.Clair has led the Boston Symphony Orchestra, (where he served as assistant conductor for several years), New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Indianapolis, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver symphonies.
[citation needed] Pacific Symphony focuses on developing and promoting both young and established composers while expanding the orchestral repertoire.
The 2013–14 season saw the continuation of a recent slate of recordings that began with two newly released compact discs in 2012–13 featuring two of today's leading composers, Philip Glass' The Passion of Ramakrishna and Michael Daugherty's Mount Rushmore, both the result of works commissioned and performed by the Symphony, with three more recordings due to be released over the next few years.
These feature the music of Symphony-commissioned works by William Bolcom, Songs of Lorca and Prometheus, James Newton Howard's I Would Plant a Tree and Richard Danielpour's Toward a Season of Peace.
The Symphony has also commissioned and recorded An American Requiem (2001) by Danielpour, and Elliot Goldenthal's Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio with Yo-Yo Ma.
It has also commissioned such composers as Paul Chihara, Daniel Catán, William Kraft, Ana Lara, Tobias Picker, Christopher Theofanidis, Frank Ticheli and Chen Yi.