'Water Concerto' intrigues, but doesn't make a splash

The stage was set with large bowls of water and a tall cylinder, also full of water. Percussionist Christopher Lamb plunged his hands and various instruments, implements, and objects into the containers, producing a fascinating variety of brightly splashing sounds and spookily somber timbres. He was shadowed and amplified by two additional percussionists playing with water at the opposite sides of the stage, Richard Flanagan and the BSO's Frank Epstein. All this was fun to watch and hear, and at one point, when Lamb was striking wooden bowls floating upside-down in the water it looked as if he were playing on cheeseburgers.

The music was most enjoyable when the water sounds ornamented Tan's vigorous orchestrations of Chinese folk tunes, or melodies composed in that style. Other moments merely sounded pretentious, effects without causes or consequences. The sounds might work well on current TV shows like ''Surface" or ''Invasion" -- one could picture strange and threatening sea-creatures or aliens dripping with slime emerging from a swamp. And like a soundtrack, the score sounded as if it were following some narrative logic that was not strictly musical. An underpopulated audience responded with approval, perhaps encouraged by the last sound in the piece, a clap on a woodblock that sounded like the premature start of an ovation.

After intermission Masur returned with Anton Bruckner's mighty Seventh Symphony, another of the composer's imposing cathedrals in sound. Bruckner's work inspires all-or-nothing responses; either his music means the world to you, or it bores you to death. Interestingly, Bruckner is a composer music director James Levine admires but feels no desire to conduct. But he seems to be following his predecessor Seiji Ozawa's excellent example by assuring that works he doesn't wish to conduct himself are represented in the repertory and led by the most authoritative and committed figures -- Masur is one of today's leading interpreters of Bruckner.