James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra and soloist Peter Serkin. Photo: Michael Lutch

The orchestra has commissioned and performed several new works by American composers this season. This past week, Levine and the BSO announced their plans for next season, which also boasts a considerable amount of new music, including more commissioned works. Two BSO commissions, Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera by John Harbison and Charles Wuorinen's Fourth Piano Concerto, as well as Movements, a rarely played work by modern master Igor Stravinsky, were on the program Saturday evening, forming a first half entirely filled with music from the past fifty years. These were balanced by a repertory staple from the nineteenth century, Johannes Brahms' Second Symphony.

The formidable line-up in the program's first half certainly puts Levine's championing of new music to the test. While I'd heard audiences respond well to several ambitious programs this past year -- including long and challenging works by composers Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt -- I wondered whether Levine's receptive honeymoon could last for the entire first season. Would BSO subscribers be up for three modern works in a row? If Saturday's full house were any indication, the answer was an unqualified "yes". Attentive and enthusiastic, they responded warmly to curtain calls by composers John Harbison and Charles Wuorinen and were positively effusive in their response to piano soloist Peter Serkin.

The Harbison piece was an effective overture, with thematic appeal on the order of good operatic curtain-raisers and the best of cinematic writing. It featured direct, clearly outlined melodic gestures and attractive, often lush orchestration. While clarity of writing was certainly one of the piece's virtues, it was occasionally achieved at the sacrifice of rhythmic variety. Still, the piece makes you wish that Harbison's abandoned operatic project Darkbloom would have come to fruition.

Movements, written in 1959, is a work from Stravinsky's last phase of compositional activity, one in which he adopted his own idiosyncratic version of serial methods. A concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, it features the composer at his most pointillistic, often evoking the fragile beauty of music by Second Viennese School composer Anton Webern. Movements is an immensely exposed work. Each gesture plays off of the previous one and sets up the next; the exact placement of every note counts. As such, it requires tremendous ensemble coordination. The work's outer sections were particularly fine in this regard, with complicated balances, entrances, and cutoffs impeccably handled. Serkin's command of the solo part was most impressive. He was eloquent throughout the wide range of expression required by the work, from delicate lyricism to angular savagery.

The Stravinsky was followed by the Wuorinen concerto. Using the full orchestra and clocking in at twenty-four minutes, this was a heftier and more dramatically contrasted version of modernism, but Wuorinen deftly balanced a plethora of material on this larger compositional canvas. The piano writing was particularly striking; once again, Serkin performed with incredible skill and sensitivity. A formidable pianist himself, Wuorinen has crafted a part that allows all of Serkin's capacities, from the poetic to the virtuosic, to shine. The orchestral writing was varied as well, sometimes erupting in explosive tutti and at other times allowing for a delicate, chamber music-like environment to prevail. Unlike most concerti of the common practice era, in which the rhetorical design pitted the orchestra against the soloist in a dramatic sort of struggle, often with shared thematic material, the Wuorinen piece offered a more subtle relationship. While there were moments in which contrasting material was deliberately juxtaposed, a symbiotic relationship between orchestra and soloist gradually revealed itself over the course of the piece.

Wuorinen's language has expanded throughout his career, making use of an ever larger catalogue of musical materials. The Fourth Concerto is no exception. While the angular gestures, brash verticals and rapid-fire post-tonal counterpoint that have become signatures of his music were all present, two other gestural elements received greater emphasis than in prior works. A number of places featured repeated notes in the orchestral accompaniment as momentary flurries; these foreshadowed one of the piece's most striking moments. At the beginning of the fourth movement, a bevy of repeated notes coalesces into a shimmering ostinato, as fleeting as it is lovely.

The Fourth Concerto is a work that is filled to the brim -- a rich tapestry of material. I'm sure that it proved challenging for some members of the audience on first hearing, yet the prevailingly warm reaction signals a note of encouragement, both to the BSO and to those in the new music community. When a performance, even one of difficult works such as Movements and the Fourth Concerto, is as eloquent as those given by Serkin, Levine and the BSO this past weekend, it serves to eradicate many of the fears and misgivings that subscription audiences have about new music.

Brahms' Second Symphony is a war horse of the Romantic symphonic repertory; Levine and the BSO did it justice with a lean, brisk and affectionate performance. The tempi tended to be quick. This was particularly effective in the first two movements. In the first, it divested the signature melodies, particularly the "lullaby" theme, of some of the sentimental baggage that has weighed them down in "schmaltzy" performances. The second movement, which has been known to plod in the wrong hands, was imparted an attractive sense of sweep. In the third movement, I missed some of the grace notes that embellish the main melody, sacrificed due to the quickness of gait, while the finale raced with abandon. While the last movement occasionally skirted the danger zone, it never raced out of control, and the consequent ebullience was a rewarding end to this vigorous and inspiring evening of music.

-- Christian Carey