E-Mail This Article to a Friend Logic and magic James Levine tackles Babbitt and Sibelius BY DAVID WEININGER

Anyone who’s paid attention to James Levine’s inaugural season with the BSO knows that one of his missions is to increase his audience’s comfort level with contemporary music — especially its thornier and more demanding corners. An important weapon in Levine’s arsenal has been the imagination that infuses his programming, which hasn’t just paired the familiar and the unfamiliar but has brought together works whose sparks can reflect off each other in ways that illuminate both. One especially successful experiment had Elliott Carter’s bubblingly strange Symphonia yoked to a majestic and driven performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

Even the most open-eared listener, though, could be forgiven for being puzzled by the music director’s first program of 2005, which sandwiches the premiere performances of Milton Babbitt’s Concerti for Orchestra (a BSO commission) between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies of Jean Sibelius. It isn’t immediately obvious how and where to locate the nexus linking these two artists. As a colleague of mine deadpanned, "They’re completely different, but other than that, they’re very similar."

You might start to think about this program by reopening the age-old question of where a composer’s technical mastery ends and artistic inspiration begins. The question became especially vexing in the 20th century when Arnold Schoenberg began writing pieces based on an ordered series of the 12 notes of the scale. He described this as a "method of composing with 12 tones." The word choice was fateful: ever since, it’s been easier to talk about 12-tone (or serial) music with reference to its method rather than to the music itself.

Babbitt’s contribution was to take Schoenberg’s innovation to its logical end. If the melodic and harmonic aspects of music could be determined by ordering them in advance, why not every other aspect — rhythm, dynamics, timbre, etc.? Babbitt set out on this course in the middle of the last century, aided by some high-level mathematics, and the result was a technique that got the ultra-forbidding name "total serialism." Virtually every aspect of a musical composition could be determined in advance by one basic choice.

And where, you cry out, would the human contribution come in? What’s the artistic value? It may be methodically interesting, but does anyone actually want to hear this stuff?

It’s a complement that some of Babbitt’s music often sounds more interesting than it should. As the New Yorker’s Alex Ross astutely noted a few years ago, "Babbitt was never an ideal adherent of the ideology ascribed to him." One way in which his music retains its interest is in its control of textures, which are often relatively sparse, allowing the ear enough space to register each new sound as an event and relate it to its musical context. You can hear this in Levine’s only recording of Babbitt’s music, a performance of the 1967 piece Correspondences for string orchestra and synthesized tape (with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on a now-deleted Deutsche Grammophon CD with music by Cage, Carter, and Schuller). The sudden dynamic shifts and changes in articulation — from long-breathed notes to darting ponticelli — sound like pieces in a puzzle rather than randomly generated events. At its best, the piece has an eloquent sense of shifting moods. It’s true that its electronic aspects make Correspondences sound dated and stale, but it hints at how Babbitt’s work can sound like a natural whole, whatever its theoretical underpinnings.

What does any of this have to do with Sibelius? In his day, the Finnish composer was one of the great reactionaries in symphonic music. Where others saw the opportunity for near-limitless expansion, he saw the need for rigor and control. Sibelius’s orchestration — a sui generis sound world — is strict and precise, flying in the face of the more flamboyant colors of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

The pinnacles of Sibelius’s achievement — the taut compression of the Fourth Symphony and the organic unfolding of the Fifth — testify to the way that rigor and control can elicit, rather than stifle, artistic inspiration. Logic and magic are reconciled. Perhaps Levine hears the same union in Babbitt. If so, he’s likely to have an uphill battle convincing his listeners, but a program bringing the two together is the best place to start.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra performs Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 and Babbitt’s Concerti for Orchestra January 13 at 8 p.m., January 14 at 1:30 p.m., and January 15 at 8 p.m. at Symphony Hall. Tickets are $27 to $105; call (617) 266-1200.

MORE MILTON. Those whose appetite has been whetted by the new piece will be happy to learn that Babbitt will be the subject of a midweek concert in New England Conservatory’s Composers Series on January 19. A cross-section of his vocal and chamber music will be performed by NEC students, faculty, and alumni at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, and admission is free; call (617) 585-1122.