E-Mail This Article to a Friend Crazy weather New works at the BSO and the New England String Ensemble, Emmanuel Music’s Harbison series, and Triple Helix play for Amnesty International BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

I wasn’t sent by the newest pieces played recently by the BSO. Scottish composer Thea Musgrave’s Turbulent Landscapes, a BSO commission, was six movements of musical illustrations of seascapes and historical paintings by J.M.W. Turner (accompanied by washed-out slide projections and a glamorous four-page full-color insert, which the dim lighting for the slides made hard to see during the performance). Structurally, dramatically, and harmonically predictable, the music neither illuminated the paintings not created a vivid world independent of them. Handel & Haydn Society music director and former BSO assistant conductor Grant Llewellyn, bass-baritone John Relyea, and the sensational Tanglewood Festival Chorus had more success with William Walton’s shlocky but exuberant Belshazzar’s Feast, a technicolor Biblical extravaganza that out-DeMilles Cecil B. DeMille.

Last week, the Swiss-born conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony, Mario Venzaga, made his BSO debut leading a program of three concertos that all featured the celebrated Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer in his first BSO subscription concert since 1992 (when he also played three concertos). The newest piece was the weakest, the American premiere of British minimalist Michael Nyman’s 2003 Violin Concerto. It’s in 22 sections, none of them lasting much more than a minute ("A possible title," Nyman wrote, "could have been ‘Contact Sheet’ "). A slow refrain recurs four times, but little other shaping goes on. Contrasting sections sound like chugging trains, twittering birds, fanfares, salsa, Gershwin, or Philip Glass — but they’re all too short for internal development, and none of them ventures into new territory. The soloist almost never stops. It’s easy listening, musical wallpaper, though I found the repetitions irritating. Opening night, the audience gave Nyman, who composed the soundtrack music for Jane Campion’s The Piano, a big hand when he came up on stage.

Kremer and young Lithuanian violist Ula Ulijona, a former Kremer student, did a nice job with Benjamin Britten’s captivating early Concerto for Violin and Viola (he wrote it when he was 18, and some of it — like the impressive horn solos — were already in his own unmistakable voice). I couldn’t tell whether Venzaga was helping or getting in the way. But in the Beethoven Violin Concerto that closed the program, my guessing ended. The conductor substituted vigor for Beethoven’s lyric warmth, boxed-in segments for Beethoven’s expansive line. Kremer plays with a fine filament of sound (a friend compared it to "cellophane noodles from Mars"). But Venzago inhibited the intimacy this sound can convey. The most Beethovenian passages were the thrilling and controversial extended cadenzas by the late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke — heroic, terrifying, and beautiful, and here Kremer was most fully in his element.

A NEW PIECE far more inventive than Nyman’s was one of the highlights of Susan Davenny Wyner’s latest New England String Ensemble concert. This was the premiere of Boston composer and Dinosaur Annex music director Scott Wheeler’s Wakefield Doubles, which followed a scintillating Bach Fourth Brandenburg Concerto (with stellar flutists Chris Krueger and Wendy Rolfe, violin virtuoso Arturo Delmoni, and composer/pianist Yehudi Wyner on the harpsichord). In Baroque fashion, Wheeler used two chamber orchestras (hence the "doubles" of the title), and the three contrasting movements, beginning with a snap of the bass strings, always had simultaneously contrasting elements — long notes versus short notes, pizzicatos versus legatos, high notes versus low notes between the two orchestras. Things happened. Something always engaged or seduced the ear. In fact, Wheeler’s original working title, Crazy Weather (the title of a John Ashbery poem), conveys Wheeler’s lively spirit better than the more formalist (and harder to remember) Wakefield Doubles.

The rest of the varied program consisted of Respighi’s ultra-Romantic Il tramonto (an Italian setting of Shelley’s "The Sunset"), ravishingly sung by soprano Maria Ferrante, and conductor Wyner’s eloquent expansion for string orchestra of Brahms’s heartwarming G-major Sextet.

JOHN HARBISON had another new work on the latest installment of Emmanuel Music’s "John Harbison and His World" series, this one a free concert at MIT’s overheated Killian Hall. The program was full of surprises and surprising connections. It began with Harbison’s teasingly exotic and spiritually erotic Mirabai Songs (1980), settings of Robert Bly’s colloquial American translations of poems by the 16th-century Indian mystic who became an outcast street singer after she refused to be burned alive after her husband’s death. In these six songs, her new husband is Krishna, the "Dark One": "I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious." Soprano Jayne West’s intense rendition was about halfway between Susan Larson’s ecstatic and cheeky abandon and Dawn Upshaw’s demure respectability. I wish pianist Robert Merfeld had captured more of the exotic, raga-like accompaniment.

Craig Smith then conducted an elegant performance of Stravinsky’s elegant Septet (1950), perhaps the most appealing and least often scheduled of that composer’s experiments with serial music. But what did this have to do with Mirabai? Or Harbison?