MIAMI — Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas

and the New World Symphony

presented the world premiere of Steve

Mackey's Tuck and Roll on Saturday at the Lincoln Theatre.

The electric guitar concerto — which featured the composer as soloist

— takes its title from an upholstery style that was popular in old American

muscle cars. A fanciful idea, perhaps, but in this case the piece proved to have

a bit too much musical stuffing for its own good.

During the performance, Mackey presented some refined virtuosic playing that

showed off his classical chops. But there seemed to be a great deal more riffing

than necessary, doubtless left over from Mackey's younger, aspiring-rock-star

days.

The orchestration itself was extremely complex, a postmodern hodge-podge that

sounded like Gershwin 's American in

Paris meets Stravinsky 's The Rite of

Spring meets Reich's Clapping

Music, with some sweeping film-score strings and the requisite number of

squeaks and squawks of modern atonality thrown in for good measure.

Mackey came onstage Saturday holding a deep red electric guitar and wearing slim

black jeans and a two-toned baseball-style concert jersey. The 44-year-old

composer then offered up electric-guitar playing with a decidedly '70s prog-rock

flavor.

In fact, it was hard to listen to this music and not be reminded of the '70s

rock band Yes — which comes as no

surprise, as the composer cites Yes guitarist Steve

Howe (who was also, by the way, classically trained) as one of his

biggest influences.

Mackey was originally a rock musician before studying classical guitar and

ultimately composition. While he has written his fair share of pieces featuring

standard instrumentation, Mackey is perhaps best known for his works that

include the electric guitar.

His Troubadour Songs, for electric guitar and string quartet, was

commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. And

Deal, Mackey's first electric guitar concerto, was written for jazz

guitarist Bill Frisell and was premiered by

the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Tuck and Roll was commissioned by Tilson Thomas and the NWS, who will

record it later this month. They also will present its West Coast premiere in

June as part of the San Francisco Symphony's

three-week American Mavericks festival.

There were some nice musical moments during Saturday's premiere when everything

seemed to jell, especially in the work's third movement, "Intrigue," which was

beautifully lyrical and highly Impressionistic in style. But overall the

concerto lacked cohesion and fluidity, often getting lost in its own clever

concept without sustaining musical momentum or moving towards any substantive

conclusion.

This is not to say that an electric guitarist can't and shouldn't play with an

orchestra, especially in this age of genre-blurring when

COLOR="#003163">Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony can join

musical forces and jam.

But the problem was that Mackey and the orchestra didn't play with each other so

much as play off each other. It was not the idea that was at fault, but its

execution.

Tuck and Roll played on the all-American-boy image of freedom that

involves listening to loud rock music while driving a big fast car down an open

road. But on this haphazard journey all over the musical map, that road,

unfortunately, led to nowhere.