Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

By Michael Walsh

Any composer's death diminishes the musical scene, but Stephen Albert's fatal automobile accident two years ago was especially costly. At 51, Albert had emerged as one of the leaders of the neo-conservative traditionalist movement, a position cemented by his winning the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for his first symphony, RiverRun, a work that was by turns lyrical, witty and sardonic. So it was a bittersweet occasion last week when the New York Philharmonic premiered Albert's Symphony No. 2: the music was first rate, and that made the loss of its composer seem all the more dear.

Commissioned by the Philharmonic, the symphony was completed in "short- score" forma piano score, with some instrumental indicationsin the fall of 1992, two months before Albert's death. Composer Sebastian Currier deciphered the manuscript and added missing dynamics. A smaller, more compact work than RiverRun, the three-movement, 20-minute symphony, as conducted by Hugh Wolff, attests to Albert's command of the post-Romantic idiom. A soaring arch, it consists of two slow movements framing a biting central scherzo, and it is full of Albert's trademark evocations of musical forebears. It opens, for example, with a motive for two clarinets, twined in thirds, that recalls Wagner, and along the way there are echoes of Debussy and Mahler as well. Albert reveled in his compositional heritage; what a pleasure it is to hear a work end as confidently as this one does, in an optimistic blaze of surging brass, fortississimo.

Albert's music is not simply a commentary on its sources, however; it is a transformation of them. "I seek a new synthesis: to find new relations between old things," he once said. "I want to form a continuum with the past, not ape it." As Albert becomes part of the past, the proof of his accomplishment is that he did exactly that.