An Argentine at Mostly Mozart

NEW YORK - Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival seems to have gone far afield from its namesake with a premiere by Argentina-born Osvaldo Golijov, whose manner, sensibility and exotic percussion are ages and hemispheres away from 18th-century Vienna.

But the spirit of Mozart was at least partly alive at Tuesday's opening of the festival with reports that Golijov was re-composing his cello/orchestral work, Azul, until the last possible minute, as Mozart did with Don Giovanni. Performers don't like that, but for audiences who know Golijov's Jewish-Hispanic voice well - and there are a lot, given his best-selling recordings - it's fascinating to hear his mind in play.

The most basic precedent for Azul, inspired partly by a Pablo Neruda poem about Machu Picchu, is Bloch's Schelomo, which is called a rhapsody rather than a concerto. As in that piece, Azul's cello soloist (the ever-electric Alisa Weilerstein) behaves more like a protagonist than a virtuoso, throughout a series of radically contrasting episodes. There's a marvelously meditative section utilizing rich orchestral color as well as a confrontation between cello and percussion so obsessively repetitive as to feel a bit like flogging.

Golijov unveiled Azul last year at Tanglewood with Yo-Yo Ma, whose imprimatur is just one manifestation of the composer's arrival at a level of recognition that's rarely accorded to the living. But as with his opera, Ainadamar (which the Opera Company of Philadelphia will present in March), Golijov has continued reworking the piece, and Tuesday's performance suggested he still hasn't found Azul's optimum version.

Less-finished Golijov can contain a certain amount of vamping, which was in evidence here. Other moments are so eccentric as to be obscure; that's not like him. At times, he slipped into film-score bombast. With more revisions, I bet he'll make better use of his accordion that's wired for electronically mutated sound. I look forward to it.

The other big news was British pianist Paul Lewis, who made his New York orchestral debut playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5: It was clean, steely and tight, the work of someone who wants to impress, as opposed to taking chances while revealing himself through the music. Where many pianists pull the tempo back to make an interpretive point, Lewis pushes forward, sometimes with a deeper purpose, sometimes just generating excitement. Given the rich experiences I've had with his recordings, I chalk this up to opening-night nerves.

The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under Louis Langrée is becoming a group of Mozart specialists who reject routine glossiness and concentrate on the disparateness packed into Mozart's elegant packages. His Symphony No. 36 was a delight, but Beethoven was propulsive far beyond what was heard from the Philadelphia Orchestra last week, and without gaping holes left by missed entrances.