MUSIC REVIEW : Composition Inspired by Moon Saves Concert of Modern Music

At one time the list of significant names in Finnish music started and ended with Jan Sibelius. In recent years, however, the operas of Aulis Sallinen and the conducting successes of Esa-Pekka Salonen have alerted the rest of the world to Finland’s vital contemporary musical scene.

Kaija Saariaho, a younger Finnish composer of no small promise, has been working at UC San Diego’s Center for Music Experiment. Her chamber orchestra composition “Io”--named after one of the moons of Jupiter--was the sole redeeming offering on SONOR’s Mandeville Auditorium concert Friday night.

Resident composer Rand Steiger conducted the 16 instrumentalists, while the composer controlled the prepared electronic tape and manipulated the miked sounds of the players. While at times the instrumental colors evoked the barren landscape of a foreign moon, there were also sections that projected a comforting rustle like the roar of surf. Saariaho’s heady sonic mix was admirably integrated, and her purposeful sense of form brought the 20-minute work to a satisfying conclusion.

From what this listener has heard of Saariaho’s work, she projects an unmistakable mystical aspiration in a disciplined, assertive idiom. “Io” sounded like the sort of composition Debussy might have written had he lived in an electronic age.

There is not too much to be said for the remainder of the concert, for neither the works nor the level of performance came close to Saariaho’s “Io.” Three compositions by Lejaren Hiller, each titled “Algorithms,” formed the heart of the program. In the 1950s, Hiller was a chemistry professor who deserted his test tubes for the newly devised electronic music laboratories at the University of Illinois.

From the evidence of these three works, composed between 1968 and 1984, he never should have left the pristine logic of the Periodic Table. His music is abstraction for its own sake: sterile, obtuse, and humorless. It should be played only as an object lesson to every computer jockey who imagines that he has a calling to compose music with electronic toys.

Joel Chadabe’s easy-listening “Many Mornings-Many Moods” proved a welcome antidote to the Hiller, but this rambling, jazzy showpiece for solo percussionist and computerized accompaniment failed to carry its weight as the program’s entire second half.

Jan Williams did an admirable star turn on xylophone, spinning out intense variations on Duke Ellington tunes. Eight SONOR players tootled a gratuitous garnish of ad lib accompaniment, but the whole concept was weak and mildly derivative.

In the program notes Chadabe claimed that he was “enhancing the beauty” of the jazz songs on which he worked. If music was Ellington’s mistress, as the title of his autobiography indicates, by comparison the home computer is Chadabe’s.