Spano leads BSO back to Gandolfi's 'Garden'

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.

Conductors differentiate themselves in part by the composers they champion. James Levine, through his sustained commitment to composers such as Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and Elliott Carter, has made the BSO a haven for modernism of the old-school variety, high and spiky.

Things run differently down in Atlanta, where Robert Spano is music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He has thrown his weight behind three highly eclectic younger composers: Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, and Michael Gandolfi. To the BSO's credit, guest conductors are encouraged to bring the music they are passionate about, so for Spano's appearance Thursday night, he brought portions of Gandolfi's "Garden of Cosmic Speculation."

It's a work not without its own Boston, well, roots. The piece was originally written for the Tanglewood Music Center's Festival of Contemporary Music, and was premiered in an earlier form in 2004. This year, Gandolfi added seven more movements to fulfill a commission by the Atlanta Symphony. It's now some 70 minutes in its entirety, but Gandolfi allows orchestras to pick and choose which movements they play, providing a mini-tour of the more expansive garden.

The title is taken from the architect Charles Jencks's book about a garden he designed in Scotland as a series of riffs on concepts in physics, such as black holes, the big bang, fractals, and quarks. Gandolfi has added his own musical gloss, responding to the garden, so in a way it's art imitating art about nature imitating nature.

More to the point, the garden proved to be ample inspiration for Gandolfi's series of deftly orchestrated miniatures. Some however are more effective than others. The piece's original four movements were extremely well received, but the more recent crop that Spano brought did not always feel like Gandolfi at his best.

"The Quark Walk" had some vivid orchestral effects, and "The Jumping Bridge" was filled with substantive and viscerally charged music. But neither the chipper minimalism of "Fractal Terrace" nor the puzzling romp through music history via quotations in "The Universe Cascade" proved persuasive at first hearing. Still, Gandolfi is a richly imaginative composer, and one hopes for a chance to hear this work in its entirety.

After the Gandolfi, Simon Preston gave a sensitive account of Poulenc's Organ Concerto. It's a solemn work that sounded perhaps a bit subdued Thursday night. One Poulenc expert has described the organ chords as conjuring "the terrifying open maw of death." Little such terror was struck in Symphony Hall, but it was a pleasure to hear the organ in action, and timpanist Timothy Genis came through with both accuracy and flair.

After intermission, Spano was very much in his element as he led a heated account of Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" Symphony. The first movement in particular built slowly but with a sense of tension and inevitability. The orchestra's playing, while not its cleanest, was still effective. The strings were at their best in the broad-boned finale; the sound seemed to surge in waves, dark and deep.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.