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SAN FRANCISCO — The American Mavericks series took a

roller-coaster ride in its sixth concert Friday with a program loaded with twisting ups and downs, careening stylistic turns and a thrilling, crashing finish.

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony and a duo of noted soloists in some of the most formidable works of the series to date. The evening opened with John Cage's Dance 4 Orchestras, a spare but dense work that made excellent use of the composers' views on silence and the role of chance in performance. The trick to the piece was its central device of four separate orchestras: one onstage, one backstage, and one each in the left and right foyer of Davies Symphony Hall, all synchronized by closed circuit television and three additional conductors.

The myriad sounds careened across the hall, enveloping

the listeners in an exploration of intricate phrases and notes that were interspersed with fleeting moments of silence. The quaintness of this atmospheric work, however, wore off after the first 15 minutes, the problem for the listener being that the piece lasted nearly a half an hour.

A change in the program put David Del

Tredici's Adventures Underground second in the order. The work's prodigious vocal demands were entrusted to soprano

COLOR="#003163">Lauren Flanigan, who added an acute acting

ability — replete with facial tics, head nods, and maniacal grins and

frowns — to the spoken words. Flanigan performed the unholy vocal solos

with an unerring technique and uproarious expression.

The Piano Concerto of Henry Cowell set the second half of the program off with a crunch, with soloist Ursula Oppens winding her way through this difficult piece. Cowell groups notes in blocks of sound, and the pianist must use elbows and forearms to achieve the precise note clusters desired. The second movement began with a wonderfully lyrical line that passed effortlessly through various woodwinds and was then transformed into a menacing figure by the solo piano.

Tilson Thomas introduced the final piece, Varèse's Amériques as "a testimony to the love of sound," and what a rapturous love it was. The stage swelled to bursting as nearly a dozen percussionists — armed with air raid sirens and a variety of noisemakers — and a Mahler-sized orchestra bolstered by seven French horns produced some of the most spectacular music of the series. Amériques began on the hushed whispers of an alto flute, supported by double harps. The bombastic battery of percussion instruments — including the air siren — was slowly introduced. The piece culminated in a deafening sonic wall bolstered by the French horns and trombones creating a strangely lustrous din. Varèse succeeded in a true amalgamation of orchestral color, timbre, instrumentation and an innate lyrical quality that brought the program to a stunning close.