A Composer Who Defines Enigma

SAN FRANCISCO — As we approach the end of a century that has known many eccentrics in music, it now seems perfectly safe to say that no composer of any stature was stranger than Giacinto Scelsi, who died in 1988 at 83.

A musically reclusive Italian count who lived in a legendary apartment overlooking the Forum in Rome, he had a penchant for being carried about like a Roman emperor; he forbade any photographs being taken of himself; he signed his name with a large circle and a thick line under it; he attempted to ban his music from being performed in Italy in perpetuity; he hired musicians and singers to be his own private orchestra. Scelsi (pronounced shell-see) called himself not a composer, but a “postman” who delivered musical messages from higher realms.

His music is not unknown. There was a small Scelsi chamber music festival in New York earlier this year, and there are several recordings, including a fine one of his clarinet music just released on the CPO label. But the six orchestral works that he wrote in the early ‘60s only came to light shortly before his death. None had ever been played in the United States until Thursday night, when Michael Tilson Thomas made “Aion” the centerpiece of the opening concert of the San Francisco Symphony’s June festival in Davies Hall, this year devoted to a celebration titled “The Sacred & the Profane.”

The work has been performed in Europe, and all the orchestral pieces were recorded a few years ago with a Polish radio and television orchestra in Krakow on a series of award-winning discs on the Accord label. But Tilson Thomas discovered serious mistakes in the parts, and, once corrected, the piece now sounds very different than the recording.

It is hard to put one’s finger on quite what Scelsi was up to. Morton Feldman called him Italy’s Ives; a Dutch musicologist described him as “a master of the yet smaller transition.” Mostly, though, the writings about Scelsi get into woozy transcendentalism (the writer of the substantial and elegant San Francisco Symphony program note, Todd Michel McComb, is an admirable exception).

With “Aion”--which uses vast arrays of deep brass and woodwind instruments, percussion, cellos and basses, and a single viola (no violins)--Scelsi said he was portraying four episodes in a day of the Brahma, and the attempt was clearly to somehow capture in sound the infinite aspect of the Hindu deity.

This is done principally through the use of microtones, that is of asking instruments to squeeze the pitch into what would be the cracks in the piano keyboard. But Scelsi also explores unusual ways of focusing on single tones and changing the colors through various ways of blowing or scraping.

The effect seems to open up huge sonic panoramas. The deeper Scelsi gets into a pitch, the bigger the music sounds and the more timeless the impression. And he goes deeper into individual sounds than I have ever heard an orchestra go.

The exactness of these pitches and their tiny gradations are at the essence of Scelsi’s music, and Tilson Thomas’ correction of pitches (the crucial viola part is entirely wrong on the recording) puts the piece into a new and spectacular focus.

I am not sure, however, where Scelsi fits into the sacred and profane business. Mystic though he was, Scelsi was also known in life for his perfumed affectations and his flowery French poetry. Even the music is as grounded as it is otherworldly--some of the great sound effects in “Aion” come from scraping large tin trash barrels.

So it was a nice touch to surround Scelsi with Mozart, who was equally at home with angels and devils in his music. The angels held sway on the formal program in the three-minute and utterly exquisite choral piece “Ave Verum Corpus,” which Mozart wrote late in his life, and the great Requiem, which he was still composing when he died.

Tilson Thomas takes a big romantic approach to the Requiem. He had on hand the solid San Francisco Symphony Chorus and operatic soloists--soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, mezzo-soprano Marietta Simpson, tenor John Aler and baritone Richard Zeller.

The orchestra is said to still be sulky after this season’s angry strike, but if that is so, it doesn’t show. The playing all evening proved rich and satisfying. And in a short preconcert program that took care of the profane bits--including some embarrassing scatological canons Mozart wrote--there was also a performance of Mozart’s “A Musical Joke” that was funnier, more theatrical and, yes, more virtuosic than the one by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Ojai Festival a few days earlier.

Tilson Thomas is following up his successful festival last year devoted to American mavericks with a program Sunday featuring Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh as co-host and including the premiere of songs from David Del Tredici’s work-in-progress, “Gay Life.”

* Thursday’s program will be repeated tonight at 8 in Davies Symphony Hall; tickets are $27-$75. The Mavericks program is Sunday at 2 p.m., with all tickets $25. The festival with concerts of Schubert and Berlioz continues through June 28. Information is (415) 864-6000.