Alarm Will Sound alerts listeners to Adams's hits

Alarm Will Sound
Alan Pierson, conductor
At: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Friday night

The first of this season's ''Composer Portraits" at the Gardner Museum brought the spectacular 20-member new-music collective Alarm Will Sound to perform a program celebrating John Adams.

Adams's output has included great successes, controversies, and failures, but it is extensive, varied, and distinctive enough to sustain interest in an entire concert of his work. This one featured some of his greatest hits, together with selections from the song play ''I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky." At the time of its 1995 premiere, the work proved problematic -- it was so politically correct it made one's teeth ache, and it still sounds like a work-in-progress. But the music does build a bridge that sways rhythmically across the gap between popular and classical music. And while Adams's music is always engaging and entertaining, he does not invariably reach for the heart as directly and successfully as he does here. Under the direction of the gifted conductor Alan Pierson, Alarm Will Sound delivered an edgy and vivid performance, with some of the instrumentalists doubling as singers for the ensemble numbers.

The most effective of the soloists was the impassioned mezzo Evangelia Kingsley as Consuelo, the undocumented immigrant from El Salvador. The songs would have created a greater effect with some knowledge of character, situation, and context. There were excellent program notes, but the lighting was so poor that the audience was left in the dark about what it was hearing.

John Orfe offered a knockout transcription for solo piano of Adams's popular orchestral lollipop, ''Short Ride in a Fast Machine." The dodgy, amusing clarinet concerto ''Gnarly Buttons," which is full of allusions to nonexistent prototypes, found a nimble-fingered, supple-toned soloist in Elisabeth Stimpert.

The best showcase for Alarm Will Sound was one of Adams's masterpieces, the 1992 Chamber Symphony which ingeniously merges the baroque practices with high-density musical acrobatics of cartoon music and the Chamber Symphony of Arnold Schoenberg. The ensemble has a visual style -- all black and gray, with lots of leeway for individual taste in silk, velvet, leather, stiletto boots, and net stockings -- but what's really fun to look at is youth, energy, and talent focused on making us hear what the music's up to.