Recently I attended the first concert of my season ticket to the National SO at the Kennedy Center. On the program was the Siegfried Idyll, the Corigliano Piano Concerto, and Dvorak 7. An NSO season ticket, while expensive, does give you the flexibility to switch in and out of concerts you want to see or avoid. I bought my particular plan because of the presence of Mahler 1 and 9; I swapped into another Mahler (the Wunderhorns with Goerne) and a couple of others. To give my long-suffering wife a break, I kept last night's, thinking that even if the Corigliano was too "out there," at least the Dvorak would be acceptable. As for the Wagner, which she usually loathes, I told her that if you didn't know it was Wagner, you'd never guess it. And what do you know, the highlight of this excellent concert was the Corigliano. Composed in 1967, it is everything you would expect from modern American music: angular, percussive, suddenly shifting in meter, key, and dynamics, yet tonal enough so that you can follow along for the most part. Pianist James Tocco, who studied the piece for ten years before playing it in public, did a great job, as far as I could tell. The NSO looked to be true believers in the music, and the crowd gave the piece a much more enthusiastic reception than I would have thought. My wife? She loved it, as did I. Leonard Slatkin, accompanied by Corigliano and Tocco, hosted a post-concert discussion as part of his Afterwords series. Before the concert he had mentioned that the reason these three pieces had been programmed -- "Sometimes there *is* a reason," he said, to general hilarity -- was because each composer expressed himself unmistakeably in the voice of his country of origin: "There is no more Czech-sounding composer than Dvorak, and nobody more German than Wagner. Corigliano speaks in an American voice just as Dvorak and Wagner speak in theirs." In Afterwords, the three discussed American music, architecture in music, and similar things. Corigliano was excellent, thoroughly engaging, speaking in an intelligent way to an interested audience without being condescending. Someone asked him about his process of composition. He said that before putting down even a single note, he maps out the entire piece: ebb and flow, dynamics, first theme, second theme, recapitulation, that sort of thing. This helps him get a better sense of the architecture -- a word he used often. You can't just decide to put a dab of something here, some other thing there, or the whole house falls down. After all, he continued, an architect doesn't start with a window and then builds a house around it. Corigliano noted how his concerto had elements of classical sonata form, "but with a twist." Corigliano, composer of the score for Altered States and The Red Violin, was asked about his film music and how its composition differs from that of his concert works. As you might expect from his comments on architecture, he was not as enthusiastic about this kind of music as he is about a 30-minute concert-hall piece. You have to take too many cues from the movie director, he continued, and talked about his Red Violin orchestral suite, "Which I don't like so much." In discussing what makes American music American, the three speakers mentioned Copland and Bernstein several times. I think it was Tocco who quoted Bernstein: "Copland's most interesting writing in jazz themes comes not in his overtly jazz pieces, but in his more serious music. The jazz influence is always there; he can't avoid it any more than he can avoid the music or the language he hears daily." That was a huge paraphrase, possibly of the remarks of all three speakers, but you get the point. To me, that raised a contradiction or at least a contrast. Corigliano had said he was not much influenced by things that were happening around him at the time of composition, that his main influences were things that had been developing twenty years before. For an American to be conducting in 1967 without taking Vietnam or San Francisco into consideration surprised me, especially in light of another Corigliano foray into popular music: He has deconstructed the poetry of Bob Dylan, setting some of Dylan's words to his own music. Corigliano said he found the poetry compelling, but was not as taken with Dylan's music as he was with the Beatles', which he found "much more interesting." Here is the Washington Post's review of the concert (registration required): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34347-2004Oct15.html Evidently the Washington Post headline writers can't be bothered with spelling the composer's name correctly (Coriligano, for those of you who don't want to register). Sad. Going into the season, this concert was the one I was looking forward to the least. But it was an unqualified success. Next in my series: Mahler 1 and Beethoven PC4, Roberto Abbado conducting; soloist Garrick Ohlsson. If the rest of the concerts are up to the quality of this one, it will have been money well spent. Mitch Friedfeld