MUSIC REVIEW : Institute at Royce Hall

At the fifth of six concerts in this summer season by the L.A. Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, the ensemble gave a performance in Royce Hall on Sunday evening that might make a marvelous audition tape, were the orchestra trying out for some professional prize.

The playing elicited by three conductors--in a program of music by Steven Mackey, John Harbison and Arnold Schoenberg--was ultra-alert, practiced and virtuosic.

The world premiere was Mackey’s “The Big Bang and Beyond,” written four years ago and then tucked in a drawer until now. Better late . . . as they say. The composer himself pinch-hit for the indisposed institute fellow scheduled to conduct the work.

The title refers to early cosmology, Mackey having been a physics student before switching to what he calls “that other realm of magic: music.” And the work communicates this aura. Marvelously fluid, it achieves a big, breezy momentousness with massed sounds and lucid textures.

The local premiere of Harbison’s “Elegiac Songs” showed the Philharmonic’s former resident composer in a Brittenesque mode, adding daubs of color and vitality to a palette basically delicate but rich in dramatic gradations. Gloria Raymond applied her lyric mezzo sensitively and Anne Harrigan conducted deftly, if not deeply.

The experienced Harbison took over the podium for Schoenberg’s ever-brilliant but complex Variations for Orchestra. While Harbison’s grasp of alternating shapes and structures, their proper liaison and bold delineation, was remarkable, it’s more important to note the total impact he made. Here was formalist chaos realized with such taut excitement and unanimity of impulse that one was left speechless.