MUSIC REVIEW : Shattering AIDS Memorial

John Corigliano, 53, must be the man of the hour in American music. Essentially a romantic who happens to value the theatricality of dissonance, he compels attention--and admiration--on vastly dissimilar stages without resorting to academic complexity for its own sake at one extreme, or capitulating to the simplistic lure of minimalism at the other.

On Thursday, the Metropolitan Opera was scheduled to stage the premiere of “The Ghosts of Versailles,” his much touted, fanciful expansion of Beaumarchais’ last and least Figaro opus. The Lyric Opera of Chicago has already announced its intention to mount the second production.

Of more immediate interest in Southern California on Wednesday, however, was the local premiere of Corigliano’s shattering Symphony No. 1.

Since its first performance in Chicago under Daniel Barenboim last year, this heroic elegy has won the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award and attracted widespread attention via a commercial recording. Performed in Louisville and, just last week, in San Francisco, it has earned virtually unanimous approval from critics and, more important, from audiences that are not usually noted for a spirit of adventure.

A highly subjective response to the devastation of AIDS, the programmatic Symphony is built on an intricate series of poetic allusions. Nevertheless, the pathos of the score requires no extra-musical associations. Corigliano’s skill can be savored on strictly abstract terms.

It should be noted at once that the local premiere did not occur--as logic might have dictated--at the Music Center under the seasoned auspices of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The locale turned out to be the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The enterprising presenter was the Pacific Symphony, here under the direction of an enlightened guest-conductor, Catherine Comet.

It would be gratifying to report that all 3,000-seats in Segerstrom Hall were taken, and that the Costa Mesa crowd went wild. Actually, countless rows yawned with empty places, and many subscribers left at intermission--before the presumably forbidding symphony even began. The response at the end suggested reasonable appreciation when a cataclysmic ovation seemed in order.

Still, one had to be grateful. The Pacific Symphony had taken a noble, progressive step in support of contemporary sensibilities. Worthy attention had been paid.

In 40 propulsive minutes of music that is sometimes harrowing, often poignant, ultimately overpowering, Corigliano unabashedly vents his feelings of “loss, anger and frustration.” By instant implication, he validates similar emotions in his listeners.

“During the past decade,” he laments in a program note, “I have lost many friends and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic.” After viewing the AIDS quilt, which interweaves thousands of fabric panels honoring persons who have died of this horrible disease, he chose to create his own testament: a musical memorial to “those I have lost . . . and those I am losing.”

The opening “apologue” rages in taut post-Wagnerian thunder, then pauses for gentle lyrical reflection. Offstage, a ghostly piano toys with fragments of an Albeniz tango in nostalgic tribute to Sheldon Shkolnik, a pianist who happened to love this encore ditty.

The wildly hysterical, macabre tarantella that follows depicts the anguished dementia of another AIDS victim close to the composer. In the subsequent chaconne, Corigliano eulogizes--and quotes--an amateur cellist and schoolday chum named Giulio. The plaintive strains gradually take on eloquent contrapuntal echoes as other friends are cited. Desperation subsides, although anguish does not, in an exquisite, shimmering epilogue.

The composer manipulates his huge orchestral apparatus with impeccable clarity and point, even with suavity. He always sustains a sensitive balance between dramatic violence and lyrical introspection. Even when in quest of modernist force, he respects such old-fashioned virtues as structural logic, rhythmic vitality and textural focus.

The Pacific Symphony management provided a painfully apt, sadly ironic footnote in a program insert announcing the death of Stuart Challender, conductor of the Sydney Symphony. A guest here in 1989, when he was a candidate for the post of music director, the 44-year-old Australian lost his own battle with AIDS on Dec. 13.

Comet, now in her sixth season with the Grand Rapids Symphony and her second with the American Symphony Orchestra, happens to be the first woman to conduct a subscription concert with the Pacific Symphony. More important, she happens to be an expert at unraveling contemporary knots. Unfazed by Corigliano’s massive convolutions, she enforced remarkable precision and propulsion, slighting neither fervor nor pathos in the process.

During the first half of the oddly constituted program, she followed comparatively trivial pursuits: Brahms’ stately and innocent Variations on a Theme of Haydn and Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Under her neat but not exactly inspired direction, the orchestra--which had played Corigliano quite brilliantly--sounded not so neat and not exactly inspired.

Christopher Parkening served as the ultra-proficient, high-spirited and well-mannered soloist in the ubiquitous Rodrigo showpiece. Discreetly amplified, his snappy guitar held its own amid thick, sometimes sluggish orchestral textures. In keeping with the temporary pops ambience, he rewarded his fans with a little encore indulgence before the intermission exodus.