‘Brick’ a Solid Building Block for Torke

The urge to write symphonies runs strong and deep in American music.

Not very imaginative 19th century Americans did it in imitation of the Europeans. But throughout the 20th century, beginning with Ives and right up to Philip Glass, our composers have turned the symphony into as authentic an American art form as our novelists have the novel.

But that makes the genre no less daunting. Michael Torke, whose “Brick Symphony” was given its premiere Wednesday night by the San Francisco Symphony, told the audience in Davies Symphony Hall that when composers are commissioned to write for an orchestra, they are usually asked to produce something brief to preface the main works of a concert. Not this time: San Francisco said he could write anything he wanted.

Torke is a composer who burst upon the scene in the early ‘80s, while still a composition student at Yale, literally waving his colors. With short orchestral pieces like “Ecstatic Orange,” Torke created a new music that found its exuberant energy in hints of rock (a pop tune bass line might generate a piece), took inspiration from the repetitions of minimalism and was built with the rhythmic rigors of Stravinsky.

The music was bright, bold, original and full of optimism. Dance companies loved it; and Torke had a close association with New York City Ballet for a while. Most audiences loved it, and some critics, this one included, found Torke a genuine breath of fresh air. Others, however, were just as passionate in their dislike of the unending bouncing-ball syncopations, the in-your-face attitude of pop music and the obsession with tonalities that didn’t modulate much.

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But there was always another, much more classical, side to Torke that almost no one liked. In works like a piano concerto and a mass, Torke threw off all his pop and post-minimalist feistiness and returned anachronistically to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But those works were seen as false steps, and Torke quickly returned to his earlier style.

With “Brick Symphony,” which is in the traditional four movements and lasts nearly 40 minutes, Torke, who is now 36, has made a fascinating, if still tentative, attempt to reconcile these two sides of his music. The highly engaging bouncy figures are still around, and so is the bright sound. That Torkean sensation of boundless energy happily remains and climaxes continue to ring with joy.

But everything is controlled in a Classical period manner. Themes develop and sequence, they modulate, and even when they pretend to go on and on happily, they are, in fact, tightly structured in a symphony built, Torke suggests by his title, like a building--brick by brick. Hints of pop have all but vanished; hints of Beethoven are much stronger. Indeed, there are startling surreal moments in these four movements, when it sounds as though a young Beethoven somehow found himself in the wrong century and was trying to write his music with modern techniques.

This is a first symphony and, I sense, just the start of a much grander synthesis of Torke’s earlier post-minimalism and his classical sides. But there is much to enjoy in it. The slow movement is asked to be played with melancholy; its orchestration is clear and luminous and the long, sinuous solos for the bass clarinet are beautiful.

The symphony ends wonderfully in a great tune and a great peroration that is grand and Beethovenian but with just enough quirky modern touches to make it exciting. It is also just the kind of gesture that audiences love, and this audience greeted the symphony with great enthusiasm.

Michael Tilson Thomas is busy bringing the Bay Area to Miami this week, conducting a special John Adams program with the New World Symphony there. So the performance was conducted by Alasdair Neale, the orchestra’s associate conductor, and it was in good hands. The performance sounded careful and affectionate.

But the symphony will delight even more, I suspect, when it is a little less new and the orchestra can open up a little more, as it did after intermission in a rousing performance of Orff’s “Carmina Burana,” another brash example of a 20th century music rethinking the past for the present. A glossy Sumi Jo, Stanford Olsen and Christopheren Nomura were the soloists.

* The San Francisco Symphony repeats “Brick Symphony” tonight and Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave. $28-$78. (415) 864-6000.