The San Francisco Symphony will present a world premiere next week by a professor of composition at Cambridge University ... “Count me out,” you interrupt.

Well, let’s start over. Robin Holloway is not your stereotype of the dry incomprehensible academic. What self-respecting academic would choose to summarize his life in two snap nonsentences on the official university Web site, disparaging his youth as a chorister at a prestigious cathedral?

Musical composition is the raison d'etre. Copious splurging from the St Paul's days, drying out mid-teens to early twenties, picking up thereafter and gradually developing an individual voice.

His publisher characterizes some of his music as “a radical liaison with Romanticism and tonality,” as if this is the last thing any self-respecting composer ought to attempt. Holloway is a postmodernist, a species that many vested interests in Europe regard with suspicion, a man who has the honesty to write, in the face of those who claim everything they write must be sui generis, “My deepest and truest impulse is to wish to be like anyone whom I really love and admire.” (Among them are Wagner and Debussy, subjects of his dissertation and later, book.)

Holloway was born in 1943 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He studied English and music at Cambridge as an undergraduate, the latter under Alexander Goehr. In addition to three other concertos for orchestra, spaced fairly evenly throughout his career, he has written two operas (Clarissa, and Boys and Girls Come Out to Play), and, in 2000, a symphony, yet to be performed in North America, commissioned by the BBC with an unusual directive: to encapsulate the history of 20th century music.

Could you give some background on the genesis of the Concerto?

MTT had always said, “I want a big piece from you,” and that was very inspiring. I was very thrilled by the marvelous Piers Plowman. It’s an allegorical English medieval poem. I certainly didn’t want to do a symphonic poem on it; I was just very excited by reading it. As I got composing, I took its vignettes of the Seven Deadly Sins and then the Seven Virtues as a starting point, and wrote a little character piece for each of the sins and each of the virtues. It was like writing a little ballet score because they were kinds of dances.

[At first] it was difficult, with this invitation to write a big piece when I’d only written these little miniatures. But then, gradually, I saw I could make a big shape in which these dances might be nested, or lodged. And so it gradually came out to cover the entire allegorical poem. Not in the Richard Strauss sense of literally telling a story, with lots of episodes and details and things that you need know to understand it. It’s much more symphonic and abstract but it’s imbued with the spirit of that poem and the mighty character of Piers Plowman himself.

How many movements? Do you have any Renaissance or medieval quotations?

No. There are six movements. The first is an introduction that shows we’re in for something of epic scope and mood and size. Like the Kullervo first movement [of Sibelius]. The second is called “Fair field full of folk.” It’s a field that’s ripe for harvesting, and the fair field full of folk is the state of the world, in all its unregenerate worldliness.

Do you use a lot of Fs in that movement, since there are so many in the title?

No, you may notice B, come to think of it [“B” is the most respected version of the poem]. The poem is alliterative. It’s told in early English, where they go into that alphabet play. “Harrowing of hell” and “Piers Plowman,” it’s all alliteration.

So it’s a huge scherzo, which is really an homage to Ives. It’s like the second movement to the Ives Second Symphony. It’s got tons of music all jostling against itself — juxtaposed, superimposed, intercut, popular musics. No actual quotes, but waltzes, polkas, minuets, scherzos, fast marches, slow marches, that I’ve cut, spliced, and distorted. And plainsongs, as well, because “Fair field full of folk” includes a corrupt church. It’s corrupt humanity, with corrupt religion and corrupt everything. And it’s the job of Piers the Mighty Plowman, who’s a sort of mixture between Hercules and Jesus Christ, to clean it up, sort it out, to harrow it, plow it, and sow it again so it grows up fair and fruitful.

And then we focus in more clearly, we get the Seven Deadly Sins.

That’s the third movement?

Yes, each of them have a brief cameo. Then we get a longer dance of a mighty figure in the allegory, Lady Mede, who seems to stand for worldly success. She is the world’s reward, in carnal, worldly terms of wealth and earthly success, the very opposite of spiritual or religious or righteous. But she’s beautiful, she’s lascivious, she’s attractive, she flaunts herself. She’s got all the Seven Deadly Sins in one. Her dance is very voluptuous and enticing and intoxicating.

And then, the fourth movement is back to Piers the Plowman. He has seen what he has to do. He’s got to plow this fair field full of folk in, sow good seed, and get a good harvest. So it’s a harrowing of hell. He becomes a Jesus figure, casting out the moneychangers and merchants from the temple to restore sacredness. [The music is] purposeful; it’s a burst of energy, where he does this job. There’s a wonderful poem by Wallace Stevens that I set to music years ago, which has got the line, “I’m plowing North America. We must blow your horn. I am plowing, plowing North America.” It’s a heroic figure of fertility and activity. So Piers the Plowman is plowing England in that sense.

And so in the middle of this we get a kind of scherzo inside a scherzo, which is the growth of what he’s done. We get spring, all delicious and frisky. Then we get summer, warmer. Then we get autumn, which is the fruits of what he’s done. We have a year’s worth of seasons, in which the fair field full of folk has brought forth it’s harvest. [The movement] ends with repose after mighty labors. The allegorical figure has done his work, gets phased out of the piece, and we’re left with the benefits.

So what follows?

The fifth movement is the dances of the Virtues. Things like prudence and fortitude and justice, and other good, strong abstract words like these — not nearly as exciting as the Sins. I did my best! I lumped the last three together in faith, hope, and charity. Faith is one big dance that matches Lady Mede. They’re both rather stately, grandiose sarabandes, one dripping with jewels and money, the other one dripping with virtue.

And then, because I thought of this in very balletic terms, there’s a final dance in which all the Seven Virtues join, showing that peace and order and harmony have been restored to the world, and we now all live in a just society.

And then the sixth movement, Epilogue, balances the prologue, in which the figures in all this recede, and [the music] just turns back into landscape from which it began, [with] a sense of great spaciousness. It’s like a hymn of triumph at the end.

In this piece, is there any unusual instrumentation?

I begged MTT for a saxophone. It wasn’t on the basic list. He let me have a saxophone.

What about the orchestration? Any extended techniques for the performers?

Yes, there’s one beautiful thing for the timpanist [David Herbert]. When I was last in San Francisco, for my orchestration of the Debussy En blanc et noir, the timpanist demonstrated to me his beautiful special timpanis. I don’t know what they’re called, but they go up very high. They begin at middle C and go up nearly an octave. You can hear the pitches very exactly, and yet they’ve got a full timpani sonority. He said, “Please, if you’re writing anything else for us, could you give them their moment?” So I did. Just before the end, and apotheosis of the hero as he merges into landscape and general benevolence and fertility, there’s a drum cadenza. It is optional — he may well have the only set in the world. So they will certainly be heard in San Francisco, but might not be heard anywhere else.

I think that it’s unusual in that is seems to be a relatively optimistic piece, a rarity, especially considering the astringency of the 20th century.

Yes it is. With the 21st century, your hurricane, natural disasters, and political disasters have loomed very large already. So the piece is unseasonably optimistic, with its trying to have a broader view. You could say that the state of the world is always that it’s a fair field full of folk that needs to be harrowed and reformed.

What were you planning the audience to experience with this Concerto?

Surely any composer of whatever idiom or a goal or aim wishes to make that goal or aim comprehensible. It’s part of the job, to put something clearly so it says, “Come in and enjoy me,” even if that’s perhaps a very complex thing or a very rarefied thing or indeed a difficult or ugly or very frightening thing. It’s just got to communicate. You must make it as attractive as you can, even if it’s full of thorns. There must be invitation; there must be seduction. You’ve got to get people into this journey by any means you’ve got, fair or foul.

Will the audience be able to figure out which sin they’re in?

With a little bit of help, yes. Anger, wrath, is obviously spitting with fury. That’s going to be very different from Avarice, which is mean and pinched and tight. You can’t be literal, but you can characterize as much as you can. Greed is going to be different from either of them; it’s going to be fat and thick and bloated. Music can do all those things, but it can’t set up the words up there. With a bit of help, I think people can get the point.

What composers have influenced you the most in writing this Concerto?

Good question. But you see, now I’m 60-plus. It’s the experience of a lifetime that goes into these things. Music I’ve loved and lived down many decades now is probably richly synthesized [within me]. But in doing the character dances, sins and virtues, especially sins, I was thinking Prokofiev, because he’s so good at these little cameo sketches in his ballets. Get envy or greed or wrath, whatever, in just a couple of minutes or less.

What would you like to leave your audience with in your new piece? What image should they take away with them?

Integration, synthesis. [A sense of] many, many diverse things, stylistically, idiomatically, formally. Seven Deadly Sins pushing one way, Seven Virtues pushing the other way. Many contraries integrated, bound together — fertility, infertility finally collaborating to produce a good harvest out of confusion.

What do you think die-hard Brahms lovers are going to think of your piece?

If they’ve got their heads screwed on and their ears reasonably with them, they’ll see it’s along the same lines.