E-Mail This Article to a Friend Commedia and ‘Amen’ Yehudi Wyner’s new piano concerto, plus Renée Fleming BY DAVID WEININGER

Yehudi Wyner opens his new piano concerto, Chiavi in mano (which the Boston Symphony Orchestra will premiere next week), in a way he’s started no other piece: with a quote from an older work. It’s a meditative, lyrical piano solo taken from his 2002 Commedia, which he wrote for clarinet and piano. So when he was asked for a title for the concerto, he suggested Commedia II. Although the name didn’t stick, in his mind, the concerto’s connections go beyond the reference to the older work.

He’s been re-reading Robert Pinsky’s version of Dante’s Inferno, he says when we meet backstage at Symphony Hall, "and there’s just something about the idea of comedy as something not just funny but that engages the world." This thought brings forth musical associations that range from Verdi’s Falstaff to Mozart’s Don Giovanni (which Mozart called a "drama giocoso") to Beethoven’s raucous, exultant sense of humor. "This is comedy that can enclose the world," Wyner says. "It allows so many possibilities rather than one passage, one serious point of view. And I think there is a great deal of that in this piece."

That’s the way our conversation goes: one topic opens up a host of diverse ideas, all of them linked in Wyner’s crowded mind in unexpected yet logical ways. And as he takes me on a tour of the new concerto, I see that that’s how its musical content works too. A small number of basic ideas are extended and transfigured in a wide variety of guises, and they’re integrated into the texture of the piece in ways that surprise yet also make sense.

The tour starts with the title page. Chiavi in mano, he explains, is an expression used by car and home salesmen in Italy: put down the payment and the keys are yours. More pertinent for Wyner is the idea that in the solo part, the keys are in hand. "There’s a conscious effort in this piece that no matter how difficult it is or how taxing it sounds, everything falls under the hand. So that the piece is really engineered to feel good for the performer.

Wyner’s music isn’t tonal, but its basic elements refer to tonality. "If you look at all the details," he continues, turning the pages of the score, "almost everything goes back to some simple constructive notions — a major third and a minor third, a tritone, and a leap of a sixth or seventh and then a reversal of a half-step," as in Wagner’s famous Tristan Prelude. "I’ve used these sources as a kind of reservoir — it’s not a prison to be broken out of, it’s a reservoir to have buckets of material come out of."

It’s also full of contrasting character. A ruminative opening piano solo is countered at once by what the composer calls "a trivial idea" in derisive, scurrying triplets in the winds. Those triplets become "an obsession," taking over the substance of the music until they’re interrupted by a passionate outburst in the strings. Many of the sections that follow make reference to a bewildering variety of styles. Since there’s no piano in the room, Wyner illustrates these in his gruff yet energetic basso voice. A short passage for winds and brass is labeled "with a rock-and-roll beat." One piano solo is written with "jazz accents" on the weak beats; another nods to the stylings of boogie-woogie pianist Mead Lux Lewis.

Everywhere, Wyner points out the recurrence of those basic musical elements — what he calls "the cellular structure, on the detail level. Now, how to do that without becoming mechanical is the real job. When I do this, the number of alternatives that are available is infinite." The problem, he says, is "how to find the one that feels continuous and directed. It’s so easy to do something here that will screw up something there. And how do you judge that?"

What Wyner calls the expressive climax of the piece comes less than a hundred bars from the end. It’s a chord progression in the trombones that outlines a plagal cadence, a resolution from the fourth degree of the scale to the tonic. This is the sequence in religious music on which the ‘Amen’ is sung, and it’s another of the piece’s basic elements, present since those obsessive triplets near the beginning. "Something crept up about this and its use that had some deep meaning for me. What that meaning is I don’t know, but when it finally happened toward the end of the piece, it somehow justified this whole apparatus. You say, ‘Oh, that’s where we’ve been heading.’

"It’s a very exuberant piece. It’s filled with fun — I hope not cheap fun." This he says with a smile. "In this there is an absolute affirmation of the joy of life. It’s a commedia but also an ‘Amen’ piece."

The Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Robert Spano, premieres Yehudi Wyner’s Chiavi in mano, with Robert Levin as soloist, on a program with Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (also with Levin), and Haydn’s Symphony No. 104. Concerts, at Symphony Hall, are February 17 at 8 p.m., February 18 at 1:30 p.m., and February 19 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $27 to $105; call (617) 266-1200.

RENÉE’S RETURN. We’re betting you don’t need much of a reason to go hear soprano Renée Fleming. But if you do, go pick up her latest CD, a program of Handel arias (on Decca) sung in good period style but with her incomparable luxurious voice and vocal poise. Five of them will be on her Symphony Hall recital program next Friday, along with Purcell, Schumann, and Berg’s Seven Early Songs. It’s part of the Bank of America Celebrity Series, on February 18 at 8 p.m., and tickets are $37 to $70; call (617) 482-6661.