An Eccentric Double Concerto by Kernis

Damien Hirst, the young British art star and sensationalist who pots sharks and saws cows, has a new book out in England titled “I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now.”

Aaron Kernis, a startling 37-year-old New York composer, has a new piece, titled a lot less imaginatively, Double Concerto for Violin, Guitar and Chamber Orchestra, which the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra played in its West Coast premiere Friday night at Veterans Wadsworth Theater. I wish it had Hirst’s title, because that is its sentiment.

Kernis, on the surface, is hardly a Hirst. His sensationalism is not gross (although there are some awfully bold and gruesome strokes in his darker pieces). But his is a sensationalism all the same, one meant to shock, overwhelm, impress and please. He is a composer who always seems at the verge of going overboard, and sometimes actually does.

The Double Concerto, which was co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra along with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Aspen Music Festival, is one of those pieces that totter dangerously and excitingly on the verge. It was not a work that came easily into the world. It arrived a year late, and one of its two soloists, popular violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, had dropped out. But the original guitarist, Sharon Isbin, has stuck in there, and the new violinist, Ani Kavafian, needs no apology.

The instruments do not pair easily together sonically, and careful amplification was necessary (and not entirely successful) for managing balances between the greater acoustic power of the violin over the guitar. But Kernis also makes matters especially hard for himself by not playing to type. His concerto grapples with big-band jazz styles in the first movement, with catchy post-minimalism in the last, and in a big 20-minute central Adagio it seeks stunning, ecstatic rapture.

Like Mahler and Bernstein, Kernis sometimes seems obsessive in trying to be so many things to so many people, although he is not entirely innocent of the charge of sentimentality. One fears, especially in the overpowering climax of the slow movement, that Kernis won’t know when to stop. He does. And in the end, the concerto is dazzling music with a very large spirit.

But it is also eccentric music, and one of its eccentricities, besides its peculiar combination of solo instruments, is its demands on the players. This is maybe more difficult music to play than it should be. Both Isbin and Kavafian are virtuoso soloists with impressive experience in birthing new works. Both, however, looked untypically worried Friday night.

We in the audience couldn’t see how the conductor, Jeffrey Kahane, looked, but the orchestra seemed on the edge of its chairs. Another rehearsal or two would surely have been welcome.

The program included Mozart’s overture to his last opera, “La Clemenza di Tito”; Kahane is an alert Mozartean. It ended with Brahms’ Serenade No. 1 in a performance that showed both the promise and the problems of the orchestra. There was fine solo playing, sometimes fine ensemble playing and near-train wrecks. It is a long piece but seemed especially so here, despite the clarity and concision of Kahane’s interpretation.