'Culture Shock' packs the house

If a concert program dedicated to groundbreaking new music is consistently successful, it hasn't reached out far enough into creative terrains worth investigating. So the full house that greeted the New York-based American Composers Orchestra at the Annenberg Center on Sunday had plenty to nosh on in the program titled "Culture Shock," even when there wasn't a lot to like. After all, today's misfire may lead to next year's breakthrough.

The centerpiece was Terry Riley's

Remember This O Mind

, and the composer himself was present, playing synthesizer and singing in a new orchestral version of his 1997 setting of words from

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

. Given how seldom East Coast audiences encounter Riley, a Californian and a champion of hippie-era values, you felt blessed to be in the same room with his joyful presence and braided beard.

The piece itself, however, wasn't in optimum form. Riley's 72-year-old voice still approximates the micro-tonal passage work drawn from the music of India as well as American blues. But the content here is so personal that large performing forces don't make sense, even when sympathetically conducted by David Alan Miller. In more chamber-like circumstances, the piece could be a confession of spiritual truths; orchestrally, it's an unintended sermon.

Elsewhere, the concert showed that music need not be intelligible to be intoxicating. Philadelphia-born composer/jazz pianist Uri Caine arrived with

Double Trouble

, a piece that embraces the competitive aspects of the piano concerto, the orchestra representing order (if just barely), and the improvisatory pianist raging away at the polar opposite.

The music was dense and eventful, displaying a brinksmanship that comes with the constant threat of chaos. Even in the relatively melodic slow movement, Caine had musical side conversations, as if he couldn't stand to miss any possibility. Once you submitted, you could be swept away by the music's energy and industry.

As fusions go, Evan Chambers'

Concerto for Fiddle and Violin

was the concert's most successful piece because the string-based vernacular element (the Irish fiddle) automatically has common ground with the orchestra. Jigs, waltzes and reels were references, but not so specifically that the composer lost his own identity. Indeed, Chambers' starting point seemed more about inner need than outer experimentation. And with the requisite Irish sentimentality that goes with this musical landscape, how could it be any other way?