Getting an earful

When the Boston Symphony Orchestra wooed and won James Levine to succeed Seiji Ozawa, it was clear to BSO audiences that we were getting one of the great conductors in the world, one of the few real maestros left in classical music.

What was less clear is that there was a price to pay -- that the BSO, at least when Levine was on the podium, would pursue perhaps the most severe aesthetic in classical music of any major orchestra, or any other conductor save for Pierre Boulez.

With Boulez, though, audiences know what they're getting -- a pointed but well-navigated journey through the high modernism of 20th- and 21st-century music.

Levine offers something else, a quid pro quo. It's as if he's saying, ''I'll give you Mozart in exchange for Ligeti. Sibelius in exchange for Babbitt. A Beethoven's Third for two Elliott Carters. "

Not that he minds the Mozart or Sibelius. It's obvious he loves it all, and that there is a profound communication going on between conductor and orchestra, whether the music is romantic or modern. This week's concert should be exquisite -- a complete concert performance of Wagner's ''The Flying Dutchman."

But is the price of Levine's glorious conducting worth all the hyper-modernistic pieces by Schoenberg, Carter, and Babbitt? The audience will, of course, vote when it comes time to renew subscriptions or decide whether to attend individual concerts.

For me, the answer is definitely yes, but it's a qualified yes. The BSO under Ozawa had ceased to be a major player in the eyes of many critics outside of Boston. The Cleveland Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnanyi, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen, or the San Francisco Symphony under former BSO assistant conductor Michael Tilson Thomas all generated more excitement than the BSO, some of whose principal players were in open rebellion against Ozawa.

Levine has quickly restored the BSO's critical reputation. There are some complaints about ragged patches when it's playing 19th- and early 20th-century repertory, but the critics who've noted those patches tend to add that it doesn't matter. Whether it's Sibelius's Fifth, Mahler's Eighth, or Schubert's Ninth, it's obvious that the BSO is once again a great orchestra.

But what of Levine's taste for modern music? And what is modern music anyway?

The Schoenberg break
In general, the beginning of the 20th century was the end of romanticism and the beginning of modernism in music. There was greater dissonance in the work of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, but the real break with the classical tradition came with the expressionistic music of Arnold Schoenberg, beginning with his works in 1905. From there, his work had little use for key signatures and would eventually leave tonality in the dust.

And that would begin the great war of the 20th century in classical music. Schoenberg's disciples would dismiss those who didn't adopt atonality or the 12-tone system as musical reactionaries, including Stravinsky, who would eventually write in Schoenberg's style as well.

That didn't stop tonality from asserting itself in the music of Aaron Copland and several American contemporaries. In his Norton Lectures at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein argued that music followed certain rules and those rules argued for tonality. Eventually a whole school of composers emerged who are often called neoclassicists or neoromantics, though few of them like either term.

Today, there are few composers who still work in a strict serialistic or 12-tone style, but most of those contemporary composers favored by Levine, such as Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, have little patience with anything that smacks of tonality or emotional catharsis.

These sons of Schoenberg -- and with very few exceptions they are all sons -- also could not care less about music that could rebuild an audience for classical music. ''If you make it difficult, they will come," seems to be their motto. ''And if they don't, to hell with the philistines. Our time will come."

The sons and daughters of Copland or the neoclassical Stravinsky, on the other hand, think of Schoenberg's music, and that of many of his disciples, as something that made sense for a certain time and place, namely Europe between the wars.

Levine also loves Stravinsky, and his performance last October of ''The Rite of Spring" was out of this world, but pairing it with Schoenberg's ''Five Pieces for Orchestra" did not have the effect of proving, at least to these ears, that Schoenberg will ever stand the test of time in terms of popularity.

It took awhile for the public to catch up to Beethoven's late quartets or Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick," but has it taken anyone 100 years to break through? We're now celebrating the centenary of when Schoenberg's music began to drive audiences away from contemporary music, and it is no more popular today.

Well, slightly more popular. I, for one, have come around to the point where I appreciate his music. (Enjoy? Maybe not.) And I love Gyorgy Ligeti (though I think his music works better in Stanley Kubrick movies than in a symphony hall). I loathe Babbitt -- my dental implants were less painful than the BSO's world premiere under Levine last January of his ''Concerti for Orchestra" -- and Carter is somewhere in between.

What bothers me most about Levine's aesthetic when it comes to modern music is its narrowness. Even Boulez, talking about his days leading the New York Philharmonic, warned, ''If one specializes too narrowly, one fails to do justice to the sort of music one wishes to promote; that very music even loses its credibility."

Other than a commission for a new piece by John Harbison, who has had a foot in both camps, there has been no room in the inn for composers who have re-established a tie with contemporary audiences.

And there are several excellent composers in that vein who are working in styles apparently not favored by Levine -- John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Thomas Ades, Christopher Rouse, Nicholas Maw, and a seemingly never-ending list of Eastern Europeans, as well as some American veterans who are still composing, such as David Diamond and Ned Rorem.

Many of these composers, such as Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize and three Grammy awards for his Sept. 11 elegy, ''On the Transmigration of Souls," grew up being ''force-fed" atonality in college before rejecting it. As he said last October in Gramophone magazine, ''There was a kind of devotion to [Schoenberg] and to a cult of complexity that insisted that demotic art -- jazz or rock or whatever -- simply couldn't provide the deepest of life's experiences. I could never figure that out because Schoenberg's music was so ugly to listen to. He was totally deaf to popular culture, which to me is a deep, rich soil."

What about the guests?
In fairness, guest conductors have been free to program works by more tonal composers. There have been works, for example, by local composers Michael Gandolfi and Yehudi Wyner while Levine was away in January and February.

But if Levine's tenure at the BSO is going to be compared with the golden age of Serge Koussevitzky, who led the orchestra for 25 years beginning in 1924 and who commissioned works from almost every great composer of his day, then Levine needs to champion a wider array of composers. Koussevitzky and his Tanglewood assistant, Bernstein, who conducted Benjamin Britten and Olivier Messiaen, had a much broader taste than Levine, though they generally favored tonality.

My friend, the late Stephen Albert, who won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy for composition and who was a harsh critic of Schoenberg and his disciples, used to say that the great sin of the atonalists, along with abstract expressionists in painting, was that they took the narrative out of art, driving away people who used to look to art to make sense of their lives, both emotionally and intellectually.

Think, for example, of how adagios of Mozart piano concertos have been used in film to evoke grand passion or Copland's and Bernstein's music to capture the breadth of emotions in ''The Heiress" and ''On the Waterfront."

When filmmakers use the music of the composers favored by Levine, the chapter heading could almost always be, ''Nothing good is happening" -- case in point: Kubrick's use of Ligeti in ''2001: A Space Odyssey," ''The Shining" and ''Eyes Wide Shut."

Even Levine's December performance of Messiaen's wondrous ''Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum," which sings of Heaven, seemed to be about The Other Place as often as not.

Searching for meaning
There is something of an Apollonian-Dionysian divide between Levine's composers and other 20th-century artists. You often need the BSO program notes to figure out what the composer is trying to do, and sometimes they don't help.

Take Robert Kirzinger on the importance of two other pieces Babbitt wrote prior to the Jan. 13 premiere. ''These two works showed the way to an extension of the principles of the twelve-tone method beyond the ordering and grouping of pitches and beginning to include other parameters as well, up to and including the linking of the characteristics of the composer's application of the twelve-tone pitch set to the largest perceptible structure of the piece. The intervallic content of a row could be easily translated to numeric values, which in turn could be applied potentially to any other quantifiable parameter of a piece -- note values (rhythm), meter, and time; quantity and type of instrument; dynamic markings, and so on."

Conversely, those who rejected atonality were accused of wearing their hearts on their sleeves. To quote Adams again, ''They would listen to my music and complain it was so overtly emotional and expressive that it felt like they were going into a brothel. That tells you how chaste attitudes were about contemporary music."

The point isn't that Adams is better than Babbitt (though he is). The point is that for an orchestra like the BSO, there should be a welcome mat for composers of every stripe.

Robert Spano, whom many critics wanted to see lead the BSO, New York Philharmonic, or Cleveland Orchestra when those positions became vacant, landed instead with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which he led in one of the best contemporary works recorded last year, Higdon's Grammy-winning ''City Scape" and ''Concerto for Orchestra."

Now Spano, whose repertoire embraces many of Levine's favorites as well, will be recording two works by Newton's Osvaldo Golijov for the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label. Shouldn't that have been a BSO project, given Golijov's local connection?

If music like Golijov's and Higdon's doesn't speak to Levine, then it doesn't. But if Levine is asking the BSO audiences to stretch, shouldn't he show that he can, too?

One 20th-century composer whom Levine has always loved is George Gershwin. An intriguing program later this month features Bach transcribed by Schoenberg, followed by Ives's Symphony No. 2, Edgard Varese's ''Ameriques," and Gershwin's ''An American in Paris."

This is a concert that unites almost every strand of 20th-century music. Every camp sees Ives as a guru, while Varese is a darling of the hyper-modernists and Gershwin is the patron saint (or rabbi) of all tonal composers, particularly for his ability to wed classical and popular music.

So how about searching for the next Gershwin as well as the next Varese? Hey, leader, strike up the band.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.