American Composers Orchestra

WEDS., NOV. 17

WHEN YOU LISTEN to music and someone asks what it makes you think of, a visual image easily paints itself in your head. But look at a piece of artwork, and few of us hear a symphony.

Long before the spectator comes into the picture, creative minds that work in each other's company are often a ready influence on the new art each creates. Composers influenced by visual artists are not so new, but the results are fascinatingly varied, an aspect the American Composers Orchestra will showcase at their season opener Wednesday on the Zankel Hall stage.

Don't worry-the unfortunate perennial favorite Pictures at an Exhibition is not one of the selections. Excerpts from Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George-inspired by pointillist master Georges Seurat-is on the program, however, as well as the music Morton Feldman wrote to score the 1963 documentary about his friend, the painter Willem de Kooning.

As usual, we can count on the American Composers Orchestra to stock up the playbill with plenty of new work, rather than cop out and tack on a dated warhorse concerto. Michael Daugherty's Fire and Blood, a concerto for violin and orchestra, will offer the virtuosic flash without the dust. This piece is based on the Diego Rivera murals celebrating the auto industry that were painted onto the walls of the Detroit Institute of Art. Rivera said at the time that he heard a symphony in the car factories; Daugherty must have heard one also.

Completing the program is Randy Woolf's "Women at an Exhibition" for chamber orchestra, electronics and video. This work grew out of a commission from the Akron Art Museum based on works from their collection selected by the composer. When Woolf noticed most of the images he had picked were of women, he latched on to the theme.

I admit that the premise sounded suspect to me, smacking too much of women as pretty things to look at, as fragile possessions to color a drawing room or fill out a garden party. Woolf was quick to counter that he wanted to avoid making one or two clichéd statements about women. "Women are shown every way," he explained. "Dainty, muscled, pampered, hard-working, naked and sexual, completely covered and demure, monstrous, delicate, genderless...music and images sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes totally in concert, and all shadings in between."

Zankel Hall, 154 W. 57th St. (7th Ave.), 212-247-7800; 7:30, $20 & $32.