"Vita Nuova' at Alice Tully Hall (New York)

New York's Alice Tully Hall is open again after extensive renovations by DS + R, the "conceptual" architecture firm. There's a big cantilevered front, and a recessed street entrance and orchestra. It's a statement, though it's hard to say of what. Alice Tully was always a smallish space, but none too inviting. It's added more curves, and the sort of woody side panels that seem de rigueur for concert halls these days, lit up rather garishly.

The acoustical fix is so-so. The big front, projecting out over West 65th Street, seems to clamor for attention, just as the entry waits to trip up the unwary heel. Almost any diversion from the disaster of nearby Lincoln Center, which has been deadening New York's musical life for four decades, would be welcome; but this overdressed Alice, a buxom society lady trying out her first post-Botox smile, is mostly just intrusive.

Check out the lobby bar, too, with the booze lit in a neonish glow. It looks like the sort of hotel where the hookers are a little too available.

The reopening is being celebrated with a variety of events that range from the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen to the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Is this what happened in China when Mao said to let a hundred flowers bloom? Never mind. Contemporary music has no style but only styles, the more the merrier. Sometimes the mix works, sometimes not.

A world in ruins?

A case in point was the Tully event I heard: the U. S. premiere of Vladimir Martynov's so-called "anti-opera," Vita Nuova, adapted from Dante's poetic cycle for Beatrice. To get the idea of an anti-opera, one must presumably also get the hang of an "anti-composer," as Martynov describes himself (and everyone else), because, he says, "The world as it has come down to us appears in the shape of ruins."

This sounds very much like old-fashioned decadence—perhaps what one should expect of a post-Soviet composer brooding on the Putin Era— as well as a convenient rationale for unabashed eclecticism.

At any rate, an anti-opera is, at least in this case, a three-act, two-and-a-half-hour oratorio, with the part of Dante spoken and sung by the excellent British tenor Mark Padmore. The cycle details Dante's love for Beatrice from his first glimpse of her, both aged nine, to the undying devotion he professes after her death at 27.

The uses of a dead lover

Beatrice (Tatiana Monogarova) sings her responses, but only once do the two join as a duet, and Dante is subsequently answered (and admonished) by two abstract personages, Amor and Donna, and a trio of boy sopranos representing "Spirits." What Dante learns, and rapturously accepts, is that profane love for his Lady must be transmuted into a sacred adoration of the Trinitarian Godhood whose feminine aspect Beatrice represents.

Verdi this isn't. The first act is long and static, with Scriabin and late Richard Strauss— hardly exemplars of chivalric chastity— vying for time with stretches of Minimalist writing and Orthodox plainsong.

The work gets going only with the death of Beatrice and Dante's own nine-day crisis, physical in appearance but spiritual in reality. It's as if Martynov, no less than Dante, is liberated only by the death of the beloved, and thereby free to recognize her "divine" personality. Not much fun for the girl.

Like Shostakovich, with a big difference

It's difficult to know what to make of this work, which is hardly Orthodox in inspiration, and far from sacred in musical execution. But it does gather force in its latter sections, and there are lovely passages and even some idiosyncratic writing, particularly for strings and brass, in all the stylistic welter. Martynov is earthier than John Taverner, the British composer who takes his inspiration from Russian Orthodoxy. But their aspirations, at least judged by Vita Nuova, seem not dissimilar.

For this listener, a little medieval spirituality goes a long way. There's a distinct nod to the coda of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony in the celesta solo that comes near the end of the score, but with a world of difference: Shostakovich, the unbeliever, looks into the abyss and finds no comfort, while Martynov, for all the fuss about ruins, exudes a certain complacency in his vision of bliss. Which view of the matter is closer to the heart of things is a matter of choice, but whose music is more deeply and persuasively felt is hardly open to doubt.

Vladimir Jurowski led the London Philharmonic and the Europa ChorAkademie; for him, at any rate, Martynov's score seemed to carry full conviction.