The centerpiece of the evening was Elliott Carter's rarely performed Piano Concerto, composed in 1963-65, a formidable challenge for the orchestra, conductor Thomson, the intrepid soloist Kuderna, and the audience as well. Lasting about 25 minutes, the piece forms a single continuous arc from beginning to end, with a short pause almost halfway through, after which the music resumes from where it had left off. The soloist plays most of the time and is accompanied by a concertino of seven woodwinds and strings clustered around the piano. Behind them, the main orchestral body provides sonic support, dialogue, and sometimes an opposing force to the solo group.

The piece begins with a brief piano introduction, attracting some sounds from the concertino. When a stridently accented chord is struck, it finds an echo in the orchestra, which rouses itself with a shout, and the concerto is launched. The soloist is like the leading actor in a play, producing free, almost improvisatory sounding soliloquies of great brilliance and intensity. Tempos fluctuate and the prevailing mood changes, but the piano returns again and again with cascading passages of complex rhetorical beauty. In the second half, the solo part gradually becomes more introspective, initiating a slower moving line in its bass register. In one of the most affecting episodes, the bass clarinet begins a long, ruminative solo, lightly accompanied, giving way to the English horn, and then to the violin and solo flute.

When the piano takes over again it re-engages the orchestra in a series of agitated passages leading to a climax. As the solo part dwindles to a few stuttering repeated notes, the orchestra takes full charge of the work's finale, raising a terrific din. The piano and concertino are buried in an explosive, timpani- and percussion-laced barrage of sound, reminiscent of Carter's earlier Symphony of Three Orchestras. Like the Symphony, the Concerto ends quietly, with a short epilogue for the piano and a few concertino instruments.

There are many exciting, dynamic, and beautiful things in this piece, among which are its powerful dramatic trajectory, its vivid keyboard writing, and its unusual mixture of solo and ensemble forces. The main weakness of the score would seem to be the predominance of the piano and its too often unmodulated, overheated rhetoric, while the orchestra and even the concertino are underutilized and could be doing much more to broaden the work's expressive scope. Kuderna, who played with great insight and virtuosity, fully realized the demands of his part, while maintaining an excellent balance of sound with the concertino and the full orchestra. Thomson somehow coordinated the diverse elements amid constantly fluctuating tempos, dynamics, and difficulties of pacing. Bravo to everyone (not least the Berkeley Symphony players) for a thrilling performance.

Following the intermission, Edgar Varèse's brief Octandre for woodwinds, brass, and string bass was given a bright, tart reading that made it seem much more modern than 1923, the year it was completed. Its coloristic, nonlinear style, with Stravinskian overtones, cleared the musical palate of all that polyphony-besotted Carter we had previously heard, preparing the audience for the final work, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, which was a great sendoff. Thomson's precise, understated, but always musical handling of the orchestra seemed to allow the players to relax, giving us a clean, flexible, and satisfying account of the piece, without the applied emotiveness and grandiloquence often encountered. In this performance Stravinsky's debt to his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov was appealingly clear.