MUSIC REVIEW : Visceral Offering by Wuorinen Redeems Avant-Garde Concert

For most of its recent history, the San Diego Symphony’s forays into the musical avant garde have been as rare as Def Leppard doing Mozart.

In 1983, when former music director David Atherton resurrected “Deserts,” a classic Edgar Varese score with a raucous tape component, the Civic Theatre audience nearly went into cardiac arrest.

Thursday night, to inaugurate its new Pulitzer series featuring music by contemporary American composers, the symphony traveled to UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, a local safe house for contemporary musical expression. Guest composer and conductor Charles Wuorinen introduced to San Diego two of his recent orchestral works paired with two Stravinsky pieces to an audience that was as small as it was loudly appreciative.

The orchestra’s electric performance of Wuorinen’s percussive, visceral “Bamboola Squared” for orchestra and tape made the venture worthwhile. Composed for a 1984 New York new music festival, “Bamboola Squared” lived up to the high critical acclaim of its debut.

It is a colorful, densely scored orchestral essay that seemed to fuse Alban Berg’s declamatory operatic style with Stravinsky’s motivic development. Oddly, the monochromatic tape part, which alternated with the orchestra in concerto fashion, sounded tame and unadventurous contrasted with Wuorinen’s brilliant orchestral writing.

A more recent Wuorinen opus, “Machault mon chou,” showed the composer in a less-flattering light, however. This brassy, noisy melange of portions of Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th-Century “Messe de Nostre Dame” would have made a nifty soundtrack for Kenneth Branagh’s action-oriented “Henry V” film, but it sounded unintentionally humorous in a concert setting. The heavy percussion and larger-than-life orchestration of “Machault mon chou” made about as much sense as, say, a concert band arrangement of Mozart’s “Requiem.”

Neither Stravinsky work added much to the concert, nor did the players evidence much enthusiasm for these stilted exercises. The “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto is little more than leftovers from the composer’s own “Histoire du Soldat” baked in a concerto grosso casserole, and “Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa” is a pointless orchestration of 16th-Century madrigals.

There was a time, during Wuorinen’s student years, when even Stravinsky’s scribbled grocery lists were hailed as monumental art. How foolish that uncritical hero worship now seems. But don’t tell our distinguished guest composer.