American Symphony Orchestra Opens Carnegie Season American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall's season-opening concert, "New York Avant-Garde," on Thursday. The orchestra performed works by Aaron Copland, George Antheil, Carl Ruggles and Charles Griffes. Carnegie Hall's 2013-14 season kicked off Thursday evening with the American Symphony Orchestra and a program from an alternate universe. Leon Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. In this mysterious land, opening nights at concert halls don't feature cozy chestnuts, but rather the granitic, plangent, little-played likes of George Antheil, Carl Ruggles and Charles Griffes. Let's call this faraway world Botsteinburg, after the American Symphony's conductor, Leon Botstein, in whom the words "esoteric" and "difficult" provoke an excitement you or I might feel if we were gifted a beach vacation. It wasn't supposed to be this way. We live on Earth, and the donors who gather for opening-night galas here want to be soothed, not shouted at. Carnegie's opening had been duly scheduled for Wednesday evening, when the glamorous Philadelphia Orchestra was to toss off bonbons by Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Saint-Saëns, with a set by the talented bassist, cellist and singer Esperanza Spalding for a contemporary frisson. But a labor action announced Wednesday by the hall's stagehands union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, caused the concert's cancellation. It was not until Thursday afternoon that the union decided that performances and negotiations could continue concurrently. The contract dispute was settled on Friday. Hence the American Symphony's de facto opening night, "New York Avant-Garde," which focused on music from the seven-year period just after World War I. In those heady days it seemed briefly possible that experimental music could gain a foothold with the public, taking its place among the standards. In works like Antheil's Jazz Symphony (1925) and Copland's Organ Symphony (1924), high art and popular music - most notably in the form of jazz - mixed before going their separate ways for decades. These were works desperate to interrogate, not ingratiate. But the American Symphony's alert, often simply beautiful performances emphasized the sumptuous, lyrical allure of music better known for its implacability. The hulking blasts of Ruggles's "Men and Mountains" (1924) weren't stinted, but neither were the quieter twilight dissonances of its all-strings second movement, "Lilacs." In Griffes's ingeniously orchestrated 1918 "Poem" for flute (the lyrical, agile Randolph Bowman), strings, harp, two French horns and percussion, the horns shone out of the thickets of strings like gold nuggets in grass. Mr. Botstein's beat can be overly square. But that quality brought out the ominous undertones in Antheil's Jazz Symphony, whose relentless repetitions of small bits of material suggest a reflection on jazz in the age of mechanical reproduction. The orchestra left it ambiguous whether the final waltz - first in the able hands of the piano soloist, Blair McMillen, then those of the whole orchestra - evoked the nostalgia of a state fair or a lifeless automaton. Copland's Organ Symphony, with Stephen Tharp as soloist, slips from melancholy to bombastic drama and back again. But bombast is status quo in Varèse's hectic "Amériques" (1918-21), with its sirens, whistles and crow calls. On Thursday its opening passages suggested "The Rite of Spring" zoomed through in fast-forward, and its heaving ending sounded like a monstrous waltz trying to emerge from a dark sea. Welcome to the season.