Giya Alexandrovich Kancheli's "Don't Grieve," which had its world premiere tonight in Davies Hall, is a 36-minute work "for baritone and full symphony orchestra." The baritone was Dmitri Hvorostovsky, in a sepulchral, but vocally excellent performance, one of the best of his nearly decade-long presence here. The San Francisco Symphony was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, who commissioned the work from the 66-year-old Georgian composer, now a resident of Belgium, and in attendance at tonight's concert. "Full orchestra" meant about 100 instruments, including extended string, woodwind and brass sections, cowbells, tambourine, bongos, and a Kancheli favorite, the accordion. Of all the figures observed at the performance, the strangest - and most significant - are these: the work's 90-line text comes from 34 separate sources, in Russian, Georgian, English and German. Considering that the total number of lines includes several repetitions, the actual ratio is about two lines per source. Why is that important? Because the result is a "poetic hodge-podge," both driving the music and sharing its disconnected, nonsensical nature. Although "Don't Grieve" was a good fit for the evening's romantic-mystical-spiritual lineup, beginning with the Prelude to Mussorgsky's "Khovanshchina" and concluding with Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe," the text's melange permeated and, to a large degree, defeated the work. Kancheli, from the Part-Schnittke-Gubaidulina "school" of musical neo-mysticism (or substitute your own terminology), has written some very enjoyable works - film scores, short concert pieces in which just the "atmosphere" is sufficient. Think of him, however faint that praise may be, as Debussy without melody or colors. Great for 10 minutes, not so much for a half an hour. Even so, there are brief passages in the new work that are quiet beautiful, although they remain fragments of something that eventually failed to emerge. Kancheli is known for his effective use of silence and very quiet passages. "Don't Grieve" is one of the loudest works in contemporary literature, vying for honors with the deafening (but "logical") finale of Kernis' Second Symphony, right up there with Rouse's "Gorgon" and Leifs' "Hekla." Through it all, Hvorostovsky stood and delivered, maintaining legato even where the music didn't seem to give him the opportunity for it, amazingly involved in the text, although going counter to the title, interpreting the piece as if it commanded constant and extreme grieving. Kancheli says he completed the work six days before September 11 last year, and he considered dedicating it to the victims of the terrorist attacks, but "I was aware that music written after the tragedy would have been different." Still, he decided to give it the current title, "addressed to everyone who endured. . . and still believed in the future." I don't see how the music could have different if it were written after 9/11 - there are few, if any, additional degrees of "sorrowful music." Nor do I see how the text, the music or Hvorostovsky's interpretation could in any way counteract grieving. Here's an example of how Kancheli's grand opus works (or, rather, doesn't) - a huge orchestral noise subsides to a line about silence from Pasternak. The word "silence" is picked up in two lines from Kancheli himself ("Silent nights and silent days"), yielding to "A mind in peace with all below," from Byron. Mandelstam's "blue horses on the red grass" follows, and then his "there's music above us," the one and only "positive" text, soon crushed under another orchestral super-tutti. Immediately, variations on "Love is dying" presented, from Dylan Thomas, Rilke, Shakespeare, then much about the world being vicious and cruel, Brodsky's "Turning the back to a disgraceful century," Goethe's "Leid und Freude," from "An Lottchen," followed by "Stirb und Werde," from "Selige Sehnsucht" - just those six words by way of establishing - what? And then Kancheli goes to Rilke for "Life and death - they are the essence," full stop. Hello? It's hard to figure out these intellectual ex-pats from the former Soviet Union, which regarded such confusing works as cause for banishment to Siberia - perhaps too harsh a response. Kancheli appears to have missed Ibsen from his impromptu digest of literature, but I thought of a good quote, from "Per Gynt" - "Too little, too much, not enough." Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]