E-Mail This Article to a Friend Get serious Both sides of Elvis Costello BY JON GARELICK

In 1935, the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, placing George Gershwin among "America’s Big Three in the light musical theater" offered an account of what he called Gershwin’s "adventures among the highbrows." Up to that point, Gershwin had written "in the symphonic field" several pieces including An American in Paris, A Rhapsody in Blue, and the then brand-new opera Porgy and Bess. Weighing Gershwin’s strengths and weaknesses, Thomson asserted, "I don’t mind his being a light composer, and I don’t mind his trying to be a serious one. But I do mind his falling between two stools."

Let’s leave aside for a minute the word "serious," which makes distinctions we don’t like to make in a world where the boundary between high and low art has long been erased. Later in the same piece, Thomson praises Porgy for "its lack of respectability, the way it can be popular and vulgar and go its own way as a professional piece without bothering about the taste-boys." Thomson — being both fair and unfair but always perceptive — was making an argument that can be applied to almost any cross-over artist you can name, from Wynton Marsalis to Yo-Yo Ma to Elvis Costello.

Costello came to the fore as part of the new-wave scene in England in the post-punk ’70s, gobbling up every idiom in rock and roll that came in his path. It wasn’t just good old-fashioned American rock and roll that grabbed Elvis, or new-fangled punk — "Watching the Detectives" and "(I Don’t Want To Go to) Chelsea" reflected the West Indian influence on the scene, one with reggae, the other with a more subtle ripple of ska. That’s not to mention the deathless ballad melody "Alison," the punkish half-rapped rave-up of "Pump It Up," or, later, the fiendishly complicated vocal line of "Beyond Belief," the C&W covers on Almost Blue, and the noirish "Almost Blue" (from the later Imperial Bedroom). That last was supposedly intended for Frank Sinatra, a Costello follow-up to Frank’s "One for My Baby." (Sinatra never went for it, but Chet Baker and Jimmy Scott did.)

Costello wasn’t interested in being just rock or new wave — he wanted to be not only beyond belief but, in Ellington’s phrase, "beyond category." And in recent years, he’s continued to pursue multiple genres. Beginning in 1993, there’s been a suite of art songs, The Juliet Letters, written for his singing and the Brodsky Quartet; Deep Down Blue, a collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell that mixed jazz and standards with Elvis and Bill originals; Painted from Memory, a collaboration with Burt Bacharach; For the Stars, a suite of originals and covers he produced for opera soprano Anne Sofie von Otter; and now Il Sogno (Deutsche Grammophon), which was commissioned by the Italian Aterballetto dance company, his first totally orchestral piece.

Il Sogno — with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas — has been sitting on Billboard’s classical chart for weeks, and there’s nothing really wrong with it. Okay, at 61 minutes it’s a little long. Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps and the complete Firebird, both ballets, are 31 and 44 minutes, respectively, in the composer’s recordings of them. But this is a "story ballet," after all, set to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which might take a little longer in the telling. And Il Sogno ("The Dream") has received respectable reviews from classical critics, including the Globe’s Richard Dyer.

From the opening dissonant chords, the orchestration and the tone colorings of Il Sogno are authoritative — low strings set against marimba, a rising figure in the strings, a flutter of flutes answered by low strings, a resolving chord set against eerie, yes, dreamlike harp figures. Then a fast six-beat figure of pizzicato strings, themes and counterthemes in strings and brass, a bright fanfare melody. The court of Theseus and Hippolyta is set with bass clarinet and cimbalon (a kind of hammered dulcimer) with a touch of The Simpsons’ theme, and then there’s the big, brassy, wedding music-march before things settle back into tonal uncertainty.