locus . . . doublure. . . solus, The New York Times New York Times, January 28, 2004 By Bernard Holland Cleveland, Jan. 25 - Olga Neuwirth's "locus . . . doublure. . . solus" for piano and orchestra is more an accusation than an offer of consolation. Raw, shrill, scratching away at the conventional comforts of musical beauty, this seven-part piece composed by this Austrian in her mid-30's is a kind of frontline journalism: written skillfully, with imagination and in high-drama mode. Its place on the Cleveland Orchestra's program at Severance Hall on a cold Saturday night - after the Overture to Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and before Strauss's "Alpine" Symphony - showed just how different the very function of music has become for many who now compose it. If Mozart's opera broods on the wages of sin, it places listeners at a comfortable distance from the brink of damnation; it invites orderly contemplation. Ms. Neuwirth's piece offers no such reassurance. Her title refers back to the historical curios and legends imagined by the writer Raymond Roussel, an early-20th-century fabulist. Yet it is hard not to hear in this music a declaration of unhappiness with the world right now. Ms.Neuwirth's fits of depression are ingenious. Mistuned strings create foggy eeriness. Chord combinations grate forcefully on the ear. Shrill peeps and percussive explosions offer theatrical punctuation. Marino Formenti at the piano is all palms, fingers, fists and forearms. The results sting, and Mr. Formenti's balletic mugging of the instrument make the pricks sharper. If beauty in music is a standard that secures our attention and conveys a message, however unpleasant, directly to the listener's heart, then "locus . . . doublure . . . solus" is beautiful. We should store its impressions in our minds, but perhaps not hear it too often. up