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BOMBAY, (Reuters) With a pained expression, Robert Ryker recalls the first time he conducted an orchestra in India.

After finishing a doctorate in conducting at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore he had taken up the role of music director at the Calcutta Symphony Orchestra. They were amateurs who were unpaid, but intensely keen. That intensity is all that Ryker now remembers.

"My God, they were expressive. It was pandemonium, the worst experience of my life," he said.

Ryker lasted less than a year in the job, leaving for more money and a series of "more prestigious positions" in Canada.

But fate - an early association with the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta and a chance encounter with an Indian woman trying to resurrect the defunct Calcutta orchestra - has brought Ryker back to India.

Now, the 63-year-old is on a mission to raise $1 million to fund India's first professional symphony orchestra.

There are eight full-time symphony orchestras in the Tokyo-Yokohama area alone, seven with annual budgets exceeding $1 million. More than 4,000 symphonic or operatic performances a year are held there, including recitals and chamber music.

By contrast, in India, Western classical music is played only by amateur and student orchestras.

They will play a different city, every night, for about 10 days.

"This concept doesn't exist anywhere. Nowhere else has this sort of undeveloped potential," Ryker says.

In time, Ryker hopes the orchestra will expand into a full-fledged symphony orchestra.

"Our real object is not to start a chamber orchestra, but a full philharmonic orchestra," says Ryker, referring to an orchestra with horn, woodwind and percussion

sections, upwards of 100 musicians.

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