New York musical test of interest to Phila.

NEW YORK - Western music may have to come up with a new stylistic category just to describe Vladimir Martynov's

Vita Nuova

.

"Audaciously Appropriated Late Romanticism" would do.

The 2½-hour work, a concert opera of sorts, was given its U.S. premiere Saturday night by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the unveiling of a $159 million remake of Alice Tully Hall. Even if it did nothing else, Vita Nuova could not have posed a better test for the new space. Both the young conductor - who will conduct at the Kimmel Center later this week - and the newly young Tully are likely to have implications for Philadelphia.

The 1,087-seat hall met challenges with the best kind of acoustical response, which is to say you never thought about the sound at all. With a medium-size orchestra, a constantly reconfigured chorus, vocal soloists on stage or intoning from a spotlighted balcony, and three boy sopranos moving to various positions, Vita Nuova elicited from Tully, in its new guise by acousticians from JaffeHolden, an acoustic both clear and supportive, neither dry nor resonant.

That Jurowski directed traffic so deftly left aside the question of whether the work received a fair hearing. The concert and another of standard repertoire Friday night at Avery Fisher Hall once again showed a conductor of interpretive sophistication and expressive depth. The most thoughtful of advocates, the Russian-born 36-year-old divines and underlines the message of the score before him regardless of genre or style. He seems more concerned with finding musical truths than with drawing attention to himself.

His presence, however, will be scrutinized in almost microscopic detail starting Thursday when he returns to Verizon Hall to lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in Mahler's Das klagende Lied and Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra. Jurowski has visited Philadelphia twice, and this third visit promises to clarify feelings orchestra and conductor have for each other to an extent that could result in a more formal relationship.

It might be easy to misinterpret Vita Nuova's intentions. The problem with the work, if it is a problem, is that it references Strauss and Wagner so directly you would be justified in wondering if you could call Martynov a composer at all. More like a curator, the Russian lays down a patchy variety of musical styles in the telling of Dante's Vita Nuova, the love poem of longing for Beatrice. Does Martynov think we're going to recognize the resemblance of one of his major themes to Wagner's leitmotif for Brünhilde? Is he commenting on Strauss' opera-within-an-opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, with recurring breakaway moments of string-ensemble-within-orchestra? Of course. But what is his point?

And he doesn't stop at late romanticism. He conjures minimalist gestures, devises an ending like Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony where each player turns out a light and leaves the stage after his or her part ends, and writes bold brushstrokes of early religious music. All this, as well as good old-fashioned dissonance, tumbles out in surprising bits and pieces.

Martynov, 63, has spent his career as a stylistic polygamist, so the piece is really no surprise, and he is certainly not the first modernist to reference history. George Crumb quoted Schubert in Black Angels, Berio used Mahler as a framework in his Sinfonia, Penderecki welcomed back traditional tonality with a recurring "Silent Night" in his Symphony No. 2.

In its drawn-out pace and stylistic shifts, Vita Nuova has a compelling meditative quality. The vocal writing - especially Dante sung by tenor Mark Padmore and the choral part taken by EuropaChorAkademie - had great tenderness, color and expressive power. Martynov takes no one for a fool. We know our Strauss and Wagner, and he knows we know it. Vita Nuova in the end felt like a tour of Western music by a guide who, if sometimes too voluble, at least can assemble an itinerary of great atmosphere.

That said, the experience paled next to the originality Friday night in a Jurowski-assembled program of late Mahler, Mozart, Ligeti, and Richard Strauss. Leon Fleisher, technically impaired to a sorrowful point, was soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major (K. 488). The less said the better here, though he at least managed a poetic second movement. But it was Jurowski who, through pacing of inevitability and connectiveness, gave that music its most soulful moments.

You might not have noticed his contribution unless you had heard other conductors micro-manipulating phrasing that really needed no further contribution from them, and it was this way, too, in Mahler's "Adagio" from the Symphony No. 10. Jurowski didn't inject profundity or vulgarity, letting the work's own terrifying narrative unfold under its own steam.

The second half of the program was half the repertoire Jurowski was to have conducted with the Philadelphia Orchestra a year ago, an appearance canceled due to illness. He performed without interruption an incisive account of Ligeti's Atmosphères and an edgy but never crass Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra (an elision which must have confused a part of the audience that broke out into applause in the middle of the Strauss).

Technically, Jurowski has it all down. His senses of balance and color are minutely calibrated. He is a masterly communicator with players, dovetailing one solo into another so that long stretches of music came across as complete ideas rather than isolated phrases.

But all these are, to some extent, logistical issues (as surprisingly rare as they are with other conductors).

The more valuable insight Jurowski brings is the one relating to emotion. The encore was more Strauss: the "Sempre più lento - Moderato molto sostenuto" and "quick waltz" from the suite from Der Rosenkavalier. Jurowski knows that in order to have a really great climax you can't have four or five smaller ones along the way. To put it clinically, release is most meaningful after a period of steady restraint. In more human terms it was a philosophy that doubtless, at its excruciating peak, brought tears to the eyes of more than one listener.