“You generally know ahead of time how much effort you have to put into publicity,” says Emily C. Zazulia ’06 from the Collegium Musicum choir. “We did the Monteverdi ‘Vespers’ with a full orchestra about a month ago, and we knew the piece itself wasn’t going to sell on campus. Boston, though, has such a flourishing early music scene, so we really pushed off-campus publicity.”

Special guests help, HRO members say, and partly for this reason, last Friday’s concert featured two rather high-profile female vocalists to accompany the orchestra. For the second piece of the night, Yannatos took the podium and conducted Blauvelt’s “Pishi,” a melancholy number with Paula Murrihy, an Irish mezzo-soprano and a recent graduate of the New England Conservatory. The piece, sung in Russian, began with an ominously dissonant moan from the orchestra, which swelled to climax as Murrihy sang her despondent first lines.

THE MAN WHO SAW IT ALL

Yannatos, wearing a tuxedo instead of his usual orange shirt and brown vest, conducted furiously from the podium, his concentration visible and his movements powerful. During rehearsals, his usually soft voice was often replaced by a sharp, angry bark as he pushed his orchestra to perfection.

“Everything one notch down!” he said once as the Orchestra finished a take of the Blauvelt. “I know it’s very seductive music, and you all want to schmaltz it, but you can’t.” Several times, Yannatos would stop the orchestra by tapping his baton on the music stand and shout the name of an offending instrument (“Bassoon!”) before continuing.

No one holds the tough criticism against him, though, as Yannatos is uniformly considered the heart and soul of the orchestra by virtue of the many years he has spent developing it. A short, unassuming man with a gentle speaking voice, the 76-year-old is extremely tender with his musicians, giving them individual attention and enthusiastically chatting with them during rehearsal breaks.

He got his start with HRO in 1964, when the student members of the orchestra elected him out of a lineup of six short-list candidates, all of whom had conducted for them in a role-reversal audition process. The faculty ratified the selection, and Yannatos has been teaching classes in the music department ever since.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Yannatos started his career in music early, already composing his own material at 11 years old. The only other career he ever considered was professional baseball, but that dream didn’t make it past the seventh grade. Every morning, Yannatos recalls, he would wake up at dawn to practice his instrument so that he could play ball in the schoolyard after class. He attended the Manhattan School of Music, and started his undergraduate career at Syracuse before transferring to the music department at Yale. He has since worked in a number of orchestras, countless festivals, and taught in several collegiate music programs.

His own compositions, which his students say are stylistically modern and experimental, often make their way into HRO’s concerts, and, over the course of the last 40 years, the orchestra has premiered many of his works. During that time, Yannatos has seen the organization through thick and thin, triumphantly leading during the good years and nursing it to health during draughts.

“We started out with a bang, because we played really difficult stuff and everybody was tremendously enthusiastic,” Yannatos says. “It was wonderful. And then the Vietnam thing just sort of depleted everything, the wind got knocked out and the kids were much more interested in protesting than playing.”

Yannatos rebuilt the orchestra through the 1970s and by the mid-’80s, it was back in shape. Today, it is unquestionably the ascendant orchestral group on campus despite the competition from groups like the Bach Society.

“The Bach-Soc started about ten years before I came in, and part of it was because there were a lot of HRO kids who weren’t happy,” he says. “The kids took it upon themselves to organize this smaller orchestra, and then the Mozart Society happened when some kids came to me who did not make HRO, didn’t want to play in the Bach-Soc, and wanted to be in an orchestra.”

Bach-Soc expanded beyond its roots in chamber music, and for a time considered itself the most exclusive orchestra at Harvard, while the Mozart Society served as something of a talent feeding ground for HRO, according to Yannatos.

“There’s always a little bit of that competitive edge,” he says, “At one point Bach-Soc thought of themselves as a very elitist group, and at a certain point, that changed, because they were not elitist by any means. The premiere orchestra was the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra and that was it. Everybody knew that.”

Today, despite the downturn in prominence, the HRO is supremely respected by national music critics and Harvard administrators alike. Yannatos recalls a year when the orchestra was short on horn players, and appealed to the admissions office for help recruiting one. Officials there responded sympathetically, saying that a “jewel like the orchestra” could not be left without a horn and promptly accepted someone who fit the bill.