Joel’s Piano Works Lack Stylistic Language

* BILLY JOEL: “Opus 1 -10: Fantasies & Delusions” Richard Joo, piano Sony Classical/Columbia Records

* * * STEVEN MACKEY: “Tuck and Roll,” “Lost and Found,” “Eating Greens” Steven Mackey, guitar; New World Symphony Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor BM G

Eight years ago, Billy Joel swore off pop song writing to devote himself to composing for piano, inspired, he says, by the 19th century classical composers he played as child. But inspired is maybe the wrong word. The first 10 such classical piano pieces, which will be released on CD on Tuesday, are mostly stuck in the 19th century. Chopin, especially, is recalled in grand flourishes, sentimental melodies and virtuosic arabesques, all decently executed by Richard Joo. But, presented without a trace of postmodern irony or any other context of our time, these commonplace, if sincere, Romantic-era gestures become empty cliches.

Without a stylistic language of his own (he completely ignores the one he has spent a career developing as a singer-songwriter), Joel gives us no choice but to hold these works--waltzes, aria, fantasy, reverie, invention and soliloquy--to Chopin’s standards. Only Opus 10, an air with an Irish flavor and subtitled “Dublinesque,” is a little less pretentious and a little more personal. It’s corny, but at least it sounds like it could have been written by Billy Joel.

Steve Mackey, a rock guitarist who went on to study classical music composition (and now teaches at Princeton), is Joel’s opposite in terms of training trajectory. And unlike Joel, Mackey never swore off one music for another. He has instead attempted to enliven classical composition with rock’s energetic and anarchic spirit.

He is not the first to advance such an evolutionary hybrid, but “Tuck and Roll,” an extended concerto for electric guitar and orchestra, is a more successful effort than most. The direct physicality and rawness of rock is at the core of the concerto; Mackey’s guitar playing is impressive; and the melodic ideas are engaging. Mackey is a restless composer, and some ideas are more compelling than others, but you never have to wait very long for something interesting to happen.

The other orchestral pieces are determinedly eclectic, with elements of post-minimalism, pop and jazz tied together with elaborate academic string. Mackey sometimes asks for odd things, but nothing seems too odd for Tilson Thomas and his eager Miami-based youth orchestra.

-- Mark Swed

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* * 1/2 PUCCINI: Messa di Gloria; Preludio sinfonico; Crisantemi Roberto Alagna, tenor; Thomas Hampson, baritone; London Symphony and London Symphony Chorus, Antonio Pappano, conductor EMI Classics

These are youthful compositions, written mostly before the great operas. Still, the Preludio sinfonico, an 1882 conservatory examination exercise, already reveals the composer’s signature surging, sweeping melodies. Or is it just conductor Pappano’s shaping genius? The Mass (1880) has some surprising, engaging moments. Puccini evokes a mournful, almost consoling God for mercy, while his Christ is more dramatic and threatening. The Gloria is childlike, playful. The Et resurrexit is powerfully scenic. Indeed, Puccini pays more attention to lines of the Creed than many other composers. But much of the work sounds dutiful.

Alagna sings the solo sections with strained, full-throated, upward scooping fervor, but the musical lines don’t justify the investment. Hampson has a few of his own smooth swoops in the Benedictus, but again the music is weak.

The Pappano-London Symphony and Chorus team gives its all. But none of this music--even the tender “Crisantemi”--is essential, as even “Manon Lescaut,” the first distinctively Puccinian opera, is.

-- Chris Pasles

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* * * 1/2 SHCHEDRIN: “Carmen” Suite, Concerto for Orchestra No. 1 (“Naughty Limericks”), Concerto for Orchestra No. 2 (“The Chimes”) Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, conductor Deutsche Grammophon * * * * AFTER MOZART Gidon Kremer, violin; Kremerata Baltica Nonesuch

Whatever moments of steaminess there might be on stage in the dance theater piece “The Car Man,” now playing at the Ahmanson, come almost as compensation for the flat musical accompaniment in the pit. You would almost think that director Matthew Bourne chose Rodion Shchedrin’s arrangement of music from Bizet’s opera for strings and percussion because that was all he could afford. But Pletnev’s downright lurid new recording of the Shchedrin score tells another story altogether. Suddenly, it becomes clear what the Russian composer was up to, which is more reinterpretation than arrangement of the music from “Carmen,” and Pletnev is so expressive that the CD probably should carry a parental warning. The first of the two short concertos for orchestra, “Naughty Limericks,” used to seem a circus-y piece; under Pletnev’s merciless baton, it becomes sharp, salacious satire. “The Chimes” is more serious, one of those sustained exercises in tintinnabulation that the Russians do so well.

Like Shchedrin, Gidon Kremer is interested in giving context to earlier music in his latest CD with his youthful Balkan chamber orchestra. Here, the Latvian violinist illuminates Mozart and his seemingly fragile musical world from the perspective of latter-day Eastern Europe. Such contemporary composers from Russia and the Ukraine as Alexander Raskatov, Valentin Silvestrov and Alfred Schnittke behave toward Mozart as if he were a friendly ghost, floating through their haunted landscapes. Meanwhile, the Kremerata Baltica enlivens Mozart’s “Serenata Notturna” with bits of modern-music commentary, offers an arrestingly vivid performance of the perennial “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and produces a startling account of Leopold Mozart’s “Toy Symphony” with modern toys.

-- M.S.

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* * * 1/2 ALKAN: Symphony for Solo Piano and other works Marc-Andre Hamelin, piano Hyperion

Alkan wrote some of the most fantastical and original of all the extravagant 19th century piano music. The sheer magnificence of his keyboard writing is thrilling; so too is the invention. Harmonies and sonorities in his music are years ahead of their time (making him sound considerably more modern than, say, Billy Joel).

So difficult are these pieces that few of even the greatest virtuosos dare tackle it, but Hamelin is fearless. To hear a solo piano take on the function of a full symphony orchestra, to hear a single pianist play as if he had extra fingers grafted on each hand could be freakish or at best gimmicky. Hamelin demonstrates that it is transcendent.

-- M.S.

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* * * * BERLIOZ: Symphonie fantastique; Love Scene from “Romeo et Juliette” Cincinnati Symphony; Paavo Jrvi, conductor Telarc

This is Paavo Jrvi’s first recording as new music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, and it’s a winner. It’s full of the ardent longing that infuses Berlioz’s musical dream of innocence lost to turbulent, misplaced love. Almost every recurrence of the Beloved theme (the idee fixe ) catches the poet’s--and the listener’s--heart. The recording is exquisitely balanced and clear, allowing proper appreciation of Berlioz’s subtlety and innovation in orchestration, use of inner dissonance and imaginative counterpoint. For the record, Jrvi takes the repeat in the first movement and uses a cornet in the ballroom scene, which adds a piquant tone color to the proceedings. The Love Scene from “Romeo et Juliette” is equally tender and passionate.

-- C.P.