n a healthy musical environment, scores such as Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Millennium Fantasy for piano and orchestra would be our daily bread.

The work for piano and orchestra, which received its Arizona premiere Sunday, April 14, in Sun City West, is typical of Zwilich: rich in harmonic imagination, detailed in orchestral coloration, alive with the sense that the composer has something to say and wants you to hear it.

Joan Tower, Michael Torke, William Bolcom, John Adams and a couple dozen others alive and writing are similarly gifted. They should be the staples of our symphonic diet, with an occasional Beethoven or Brahms piece thrown in for perspective.

The opposite is true, and because of that the "classical music" world is a bleak universe that overly regards the past and grossly undervalues the present.

But for 20 minutes on Sunday, we got to kick back and experience a little of what might be, as the Symphony of the West Valley and pianist Jeffrey Biegel performed Millennium Fantasy for a perplexed, if polite, audience.

The biggest surprise was the title, or rather how the work didn't match expectations roused by the title. No earth-shaking piece of musical historiography, Millennium Fantasy proved to be a personal statement on the passing of time, scored for small forces (chamber-size winds, percussion, piano and strings) and pinned to the fanciful memory of a Celtic-flavored folksong called Fair and Tender Maiden.

Zwilich uses the tune, which she says her grandmother sang to her long ago, as departure for a meditation in which the piano comments on orchestral mutations of the melody. Now plaintive and pastoral, now Gershwinian in its syncopations, the scores flies through time while trying to hold onto shards of melody as if they were dying memories.

Biegel played with pearly brilliance - here is a pianist who knows how to produce tone, where many settle for volume - and with bold enthusiasm. A champion of new scores, he engineered the commission of the work, which was shared by a number of orchestras. Thanks to music director James Yestadt, Symphony of the West Valley was among them.

Yestadt and his musicians showed great ability as accompanists, not only on the Zwilich, but in the familiar bars of Liszt's Piano Concerto No.1, which Biegel also played. It's a signature concerto for Biegel, and with good reason: He conveys Liszt as if it were Mozart, with transparently beautiful voicing and an unerring sense of grace.