Premieres

Composer George Rochberg, 40, has a distaste for "the terribly logical ways of classical music" and a yen for the rockier paths of atonality. Composer Norman Dello Joio, 46, is an unabashed romantic with a lucidly lyrical touch and scorn for the "black-noted paper" school of composers, who "feel sorry for themselves because they are misunderstood." Last week Composers Rochberg and Dello Joio each unveiled new works.

P: Rochberg's Symphony No. 2, as performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, was a thickly textured, darkly intense work that moved in a riptide of conflicting rhythms and clashing dissonances. It opened with an impassioned theme in the strings and horns, unfolded into a busy, brusque scherzo touched with jazz. The finale built to a rushing climax, then subsided in a resigned, dramatically simple theme played by strings and woodwinds. The audience could summon up only polite applause. But Cleveland's Composer-Critic Herbert Elwell found Rochberg's mastery of the tone row remarkable and his symphonic ideas "deeply absorbing." The style, explained Composer Rochberg, was strongly influenced by Schoenberg, but he had a warning for young composers who turn to Schoenberg and Stravinsky too early: "Before you take off, you've got to be on the ground."

P: Dello Joio's 15-minute cantata performed in Kansas City was adapted from Poet John Dryden's famed A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, a poem intended, in Dello Joio's words, as "a big hymn glorifying music in the cosmic sense--the miracle of it all." Sung by the University of Kansas Choir with brass accompaniment, the work often had the rich sonority of a cathedral organ. A simple, stirring work with no sharply dissonant edges, the cantata was marked by the melodic interplay of brasses and voices and by some stunningly lush vocal climaxes, notably in the last stanza:

The dead shall live,

The living die,

The Trumpet shall be heard on high,

And Music shall untune the sky.

Composer Dello Joio describes the work as "ecstatic," and the delighted audience agreed with him. Conductor Clayton Krehbiel described it more prosaically: "I thought we were going to blow the listeners out of the room!"

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