End-ish times

Friday’s splendid concert, the final salvo of the 2014-15 season, brought rapture, all right, but with a touch of unease. After an evening of old-sounding “new” music and newsounding “old” music, you have to wonder whether we are living in the symphony orchestra’s end times — or at least its endish times.

Which piece of music, do you suppose, rocked the audience with off-kilter shocks, arrestingly fresh sonorities, daring rhythmic displacements, rug-pulling mood shifts and overall what-the-hell-is-coming-next-ness?

Hint: It wasn’t the evening’s world premiere of “Variations on a Folk Tune for Piano and Orchestra” by American neoromantic Robert Aldridge. (It wasn´t the “William Tell” Overture either, although Rossini’s famous romp gets second place in Friday’s fresh tomato contest.)

Alas, Aldridge’s music, cannily crafted and played with verve and precision, already sounded middle-aged in its cradle.

Aldridge is in a growing group of American composers to move into a cozy cul-de-sac in the suburbs of the sprawling, towering symphonic Babel of old, complete with Neighborhood Watch on the lookout for jarring noises.

When a composer is as sure of his idiom as Aldridge, and an orchestra as game as Lansing’s, there is pleasure to be had. The titular theme of “Variations” is a plaintive, call-and-response cry John Coltrane might have picked up and carried to the far horizons. Pianist Melissa Marse avoided the huffing and puffing and banging that would have sunk the enterprise. She kept a light touch, darting, hovering and surging up the stream of variations like a supple rainbow trout.

One of the variations, a thundering gallop driven by a terrific timpani tantrum, kicked at the barn door of the familiar neoromantic formula.

The rest were saturated in honeyed tones and surging waves of drama, the symphonic equivalent of comfort food. Classic film music, a passion of Aldridge, often came to mind. One variation seemed to send the main melody out for drinks at Sardi’s to make moon eyes at Audrey Hepburn. You knew a vigorous major-chord hosing would be followed by a delicate after-tinkle, even before the tinkle tinkled.

A cynic might say that the world has gained another new work that can be programmed in middle-town symphony orchestras without pissing off older subscribers.

But I’m not a cynic. It helped me to think of “Variations” as finely wrought film music, a once-honorable art that in the past 20 years has swirled straight down a toilet of turdfully beating drums and Carl Orff-ish devil chanting. Aldridge’s craft comes into dramatic relief when set against cinematic wreckers like Brian Tyler, say.

But he hasn’t chosen that company, and he wasn’t in it Friday.

Instead, he had the bad fortune of being upstaged by the most formidable showman/ innovator of 20th century music.

Count the home team’s rampage through Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite as one of its finest hours, ever. The sheer shock and awe, even in one of Stravinsky’s more crowd-pleasing and child-friendly scores, slapped your face all the more after the mothball smell of “new” music.

The symphony’s strings may have never sounded so velvety and lush, but they kept the texture under fine control, thinning themselves into a billowing gossamer borealis when the music called for it.

To coordinate the music’s pinballing course, Maestro Timothy Muffitt made enormous double circles with his arms I’m not sure I’ve ever beheld before. In slow build-ups, he rode the brakes in a maddeningly methodical manner, delaying and heightening the orgasmic fireworks to follow. Many soloists were exposed, and all of them delivered the goods — most notably, principal cellist Hong Hong, whose tender stillness perfectly set the stage for the tumult to come.

Of course, it’s grossly unfair to compare any mortal, living or dead, with Stravinsky. “Firebird” is the cat-and-mouse play of a genius, with fakeouts and sucker punches that make its straight-up wonderment all the more overwhelming. The LSO took it all on, from the tricky to the taxing, with the aplomb of a big-city symphony, minus the jaded air of entitlement. (“Rite of Spring,” anyone? They seem ready to me.)

So what if Babel’s new subdivision is a dead end. You can always go back to Tomorrowland. By the time the final chords of “The Firebird” bashed the walls of the Wharton Center Friday, Stravinsky still sounded like the music of the future.