Robin Holloway (world premiere) and Brahms: San Francisco Symphony, Christian Tetzlaff, violin, San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 03.02.2007 (HS)

Robin Holloway's newest Concerto for Orchestra, his fourth, takes the medieval epic poem Piers Plowman as its programme. You know, the one with the "Fair Field Full of Folk" in it. The Cambridge-based composer delivered a gargantuan score to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who also led the 1995 premiere of the third Concerto for Orchestra with the London Symphony Orchestra. This new score was so long that it couldn't fit on a program with another work. Trimmed to 65 minutes by eliminating one whole section, it sits uncomfortably on this one with Brahms' deftly packaged Violin Concerto. The comparison does not flatter the new work.

The redoubtable German violinist Christian Tetzlaff, who recently turned 40 but still looks vaguely like a college student, poured plenty of energy into a spacious account of the concerto. Somehow Holloway's effulgent music, which occupied the first half, managed to make even Brahms' orchestrations, often regarded as relatively thick, sound spare and airy.

Make no mistake, Holloway has a master's touch with orchestration, writes virtuosic passages for virtually every instrument, and he coins musical ideas seemingly with ease. Those ideas are not exactly groundbreaking. They echo the sound of the late Romantics. Richard Strauss comes to mind repeatedly. In fact, one critic wrote that this work sounds like the late tone poem Strauss never wrote. And that's true, except for one glaring difference. Strauss understood that the human mind wants something to recur, to perceive some sort of form in the music, to have it make some sense. If anything recurs in this concerto, I missed it.

And that, in the end, makes the concerto too much of a muchness. It becomes a string of moments, some of them arresting, often beautiful, but like a shark it keeps nosing ahead in the water, never retreating, never circling back to give us the satisfaction of warming up to something. The episodic tale of Piers Plowman isn't enough to glue this olio together.

There are some striking gestures in the wispy opening of "Prologue," which bury an ominous rumbling under the murky colors of dawn. The second movement, a scherzo titled "Fair Field Full of Folk," stitches together snatches of disparate music, evoking Scotland here, a German peasant dance there, even a touch of plainsong. It's a panorama, rather than a cohesive whole, but it sounds absolutely brilliant in spots.

"Dances: 1st Sequence" gives us a parade of mini-portraits of the seven deadly sins. One especially arresting moment comes at the end of "Wrath," when a solo tuba breaks through the din of the climax for a spectacular cadenza. This leads to the subterranean rumblings in low brass, woodwinds and strings of "Envy." The sequence ends with a slow-jazz-infused sketch of "Lady Mede." (This music must have been much more rewarding than the missing second dance sequence, presenting six virtues, which was to have preceded the "Epilogue.")

The fourth section, "Narration," starts with a recitative-like passage that passes from trumpets to trombones to horns and on through the orchestra, reminiscent of the "Pairs" in Bartok's famous Concerto for Orchestra. Again there is a cadenza for an unexpected soloist, a bravura sequence for tympani, including an array of small kettledrums suspended above the player, which leads to a lively scherzinetto.

This passes seamlessly over the missing Virtues into "Epilogue," which whips up a big, loud finish rather unexpectedly, without the sort of long buildup that the true Romantics would have reveled in.

After all that, Brahms seems rather chaste. Tetzlaff and Tilson Thomas paid special attention to the delicate moments, the sweetness of the slow movement especially inviting, but even then the contrast with the lively Gypsy-like finale sounded refined and satisfyingly of a piece after the outsized orchestral ejaculations of Holloway's epic.

Harvey Steiman