Suppose you had a cure for cancer.

Bear with me now.

Suppose you had a cure for cancer, that you were sure would work. Every type of cancer. One of the biggest medical advances in history, up there with penicillin and the polio vaccine.

So you tell your friends, and they all tell you it�s great and you�re a genius, but none of them is a doctor or a multimillionaire and none of their friends are either, so you figure your great idea is going to languish for lack of an appropriate venue in which to proclaim it.

Then, one day, you read in the newspaper that the International Oncology Conference is going to be held in your town, and that the IOC features an open-mike night where members of the public are free to express their opinions and theories to the gathering of cancer specialists. You sign up, you are given thirty-one minutes and twenty-eight seconds to speak, and you save the world.

I don�t like twentieth-century American orchestral music. Well, that�s not quite fair � but I am disinclined to like a piece of said music that I�ve not heard, and it is guilty until proven innocent. Perhaps it is a reflection of our musical culture and economy, or perhaps it�s just my imagination, but the majority of recent American orchestral music reminds me of our cancer-curing friend�s address to the oncologists � there�s an air of desperation, as if the composer knew that orchestral commissions were a rare commodity and he better say what he has to say now because he might not ever get another chance. Everything, as a result, has to scream ORCHESTRA � everything�s loud, everything�s portentous, unison middle and low brass lines, screaming dissonant chords topped with piccolo and anchored by the overabundant (cancerous?) percussion, everything you can�t do with a string quartet or a piano or a Pierrot ensemble. Oh, and try not to have any particularly controversial ideas, or you might not get invited back.

So it is with George Rochberg�s Second Symphony (1955-6). It�s also worth pointing out a side effect of this orchestral syndrome, in connection with the fact that it�s forbidden to mention Rochberg without describing how he dramatically and somewhat didactically abandoned serialism in his Third Quartet, finding it inadequate to express his grief over the death of his son. This symphony, which predates that quartet by twenty years, is serial, but it doesn�t matter. I have a strong sense that the piece is about those brass lines and dissonant chords, that the effect would have been precisely the same had the pitches been framed in some sort of extended post-Bartokian tonality. This does not reflect on the inherent nature of serialism or of any other mode of selecting one�s pitches, and it is not an indictment of Rochberg; it�s just the generalized, directionlessly vague nature of the symphony�s musical rhetoric.

There are some marvelous touches, which suggest that the knee-jerk bluster is suppressing some artistic impulse: from the evidence of this symphony, Rochberg has a masterful touch for atonal two-part counterpoint, which he deploys as a textural motive throughout the piece to beautiful effect. But generally speaking, this is mid-century American bluster, and whether tonal or atonal or serial or anything else it�s also a bore.

The rest of the disc is given over to the first recording of a later orchestral work entitled Imago Mundi (1973), which might as well have been put there as a pre-emptive response to everything I wrote above. It�s American, it�s twentieth-century, and it�s for orchestra, but it�s also brilliantly and strikingly inventive, texturally, harmonically and formally, from the first gesture through the last whisper. Imago Mundi is everything that the Second Symphony is not. It fetishizes repetition in a most disruptive way throughout its twenty-plus minutes (inspired by Japanese ritualistic music, but we�ll forgive that), wrenches powerful effects from unusual orchestrations, and is admirably consistent and focused in its gestural scope. Only a several-minute-long dance episode, probably mandated by the quasi-programmatic backstory of the piece, interferes with the beautifully and robustly fashioned universe that Imago Mundi proposes. Unlike the Second Symphony, this work makes an attempt to delve into the resources of the orchestra with a mindset of discovery, not merely one of more or less faithful replication of a Beethovenian archetype.

The performances are uniformly excellent in both works: the brass is incisive, powerful, clean and accurate in the Second Symphony (and who really cares about the other instruments in a piece like this?), and the more intricate and subtle demands of Imago Mundi prove that the Saarbr�cken RSO is up to the challenge of unconventional orchestrational environments.

This is a disc worth acquiring, and I won�t tell on you if instead of listening to the Second Symphony you play Imago Mundi twice.