Maazel opens with moving tribute to 9.11

John Adams premiere

Lincoln Center, New York

HEAD-SCRATCHING followed Lorin Maazel's appointment as the Philharmonic's music director last year. The mystery has been how a brilliant and intelligent musician with the lithe body of a dancer can deliver such emotionless performances? He leaps, he gyrates, he stabs the air. Yet Maazel's frequent inability to connect emotionally with his audience is as puzzling and tragic as Al Gore's. Except Maazel got the top job.

The audience got an earful of what's in store for the next four years (the duration of Maazel's contract) beginning with a gala that paired Beethoven's Ninth with Leonore Overture No3.

Maazel elicited an intriguing transparency from the famously muscular Philharmonic.

But despite sprightly tempos, the evening was a bedizened corpse.

The second evening offered the premiere of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a memorial for 9.11 deemed too sombre for the gala crowd. The 26-minute "memory space" incorporated recited names of victims with text fragments from missingperson posters. The voices, along with traffic noises that began and ended the piece, were projected throughout the hall and braided through the music scored for orchestra, adult and youth choruses. Using microtonalism as colour and minimalism as a jumping-off point, Adams created a meditative memorial that was deeply moving. He avoided pathos and resisted representing the events of that horrific day, although the work's specificity may ultimately relegate it to an occasional piece.

The Beethoven Ninth that followed revealed what Maazel can do. It sparkled, it boomed, it was even a little joyful.

And bass Ren Pape was outstanding (think of a young Fischer- Dieskau but with a beautiful voice).

As for Maazel, when he's good, he's very very good.

But when he's bad

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