MUSIC REVIEW : Crowd Cheers as Critic Yawns at Yanni’s Fluff

Greek-born performer-composer Yanni culled selections from his six Private Music albums for a two-hour concert of new-age candelabra music Thursday at Copley Symphony Hall.

Judging from the gasps of applause that greeted the conclusion of each of the keyboardist’s instrumentals, the near-capacity crowd of 2,000 was delighted with what they heard. Consider it a case of modest demands easily met.

This is the musical equivalent of the nouvelle cuisine that, mercifully, has lost favor in the world of dining. The emphasis is on pleasing presentation, and the artist operates on the premise that his patrons accept the notion of rich-sounding ingredients justifying skimpy fare.

Ultimately, Yanni’s “compositions” are little more than attractive garnishes in search of an entree.

Certainly, chef Yanni didn’t scrimp in the way of presentation. Dressed in casual-elegant white, the keyboardist moved back and forth between an impressive bank of synthesizers and a grand piano. His traveling “orchestrette”--two additional keyboardists, a percussionist, a drummer, a bassist and a string quartet--were arranged in a vivid, multi-level tableau and showered with a succession of oh-wow lighting effects.

Good players all, they made a valiant effort to flesh out Yanni’s sketchy ideas. But his music suffers from a creative anorexia that defeats such artificial heft. What pass for melodies are merely repetitious series of consonant intervals without defining symmetry or inflection. There are almost no surprises in the arrangements, which do little more than give big, Buscaglia-esque hugs to Yanni’s feel-good impulses. The players’ parts are mostly window-dressing.

It didn’t matter. To waves of adulation, Yanni and band performed such misty-roses pieces as “Secret Vows,” “In the Mirror,” “Nostalgia” and the title track of his latest release, “Reflections of Passion.” It is no coincidence that these titles sound like the names of perfumes; Yanni’s sound is implied grace and sensitivity peddled as the genuine items.

The timbres he coaxed from a phalanx of synthesizers whooshed and sparkled like quicksilver; there was an insistent “prettiness” to the fragmentary melodies and textures. Yanni’s harmonic vocabulary of stock major and minor chords met the requirements of those who prefer their music reduced and neatly compartmentalized into “happy” moments and “sad” moments.

But, for all its pretense at passion and color, Thursday’s concert was one Grecian formula that couldn’t hide the gray. Laid out in a linear program, Yanni’s material seemed only a high-tech step removed from the lobotomizing fluff heard on Beautiful Music radio--all rippling arpeggios resting on tufted cushions of “sampled” strings, and applied to auto-pilot chord changes familiar to any beginning piano student.

It is a generic sound with many relatives--all of them working. This kind of music is heard as incidental accompaniment to slow-motion recaps of gymnastics or figure skating performances; as the soft-focus, billowing-curtain “romantic” music heard on daytime soaps; in the melodramatic scores of television miniseries based on books by Judith Krantz or Danielle Steele.

In Thursday’s show, tune after tune washed by like bay wavelets, mesmerizing in their incessant similarity. Perhaps to break up this stasis, Yanni provided periodic, visual accents with dramatic tosses of his long, black mane. He could have tossed it like a salad and it wouldn’t have produced the dynamics this music sorely lacks.

The only moments of spontaneous combustion came in a mid- concert, improvisational violin duel that pitted Karen Briggs against Charlie Bisharat, and later in an oddly welcome drum solo by Charlie Adams. Their heroics, however, couldn’t salvage the program. These were musicians, not alchemists.

“It’s one thing to stay awake late at night thinking up these musical ideas, and another thing to record them in the studio,” said Yanni in one of several brief, self-reflective addresses to the crowd. “But the true test of a composition is in its live performance.”

If so, the Symphony Hall crowd gave him an overall grade of “A” for this test. They clapped, they whistled, they hooted, and, at the end of the two-hour program, they rose to their feet in a sustained ovation.

It was not difficult to understand the appeal of Yanni’s very average music to those with an undoubtedly limited exposure to truly great music.

However, for those who have reached a point where they demand depth and dimension in their music--the developmental gradations of tone, expression, rhythm, harmony, and melody that elicit profound emotional, psychological, and even visceral responses--an entire evening of this moodmeister ‘s music was a “yawny” experience, indeed.