Resolute, strong-willed, muscular and efficient, Charles Wuorinen’s music is going busily into the world at a rapid rate. One might have thought one had caught up with it last year, when several concerts celebrated his 60th birthday. But no: waiting in the wings were a big work for the Toledo Symphony ("Symphony Seven," to be given its premiere next month) and more than an hour of orchestral music for the New York City Ballet.

    The latter score is a three-act piece based on scenes and images from Dante’s "Divine Comedy," subject matter that only a composer of Mr. Wuorinen’s brisk confidence might want to tackle. Another of his traits is practicality. Recognizing that his ballet score might not get too many concert performances in the current climate, he arranged It for smaller groupings. The first act, "The Mission of Virgil," became a piece for two pianos, already recorded. On Saturday at the Guggenheim Museum, Oliver Knussen conducted a team of outstanding chamber musicians to add the succeeding parts, "The Great Procession" and "The River of Light," in their mixed-ensemble versions.

    All three titles contain nouns of direction and progression, and all three scores contain music with those same qualities. Just as he happily takes on Dante, so Mr. Wuorinen has always been remarkably free of hang-ups with regard to his great musical predecessors, and these ballet works are characteristic in being robust enough to accommodate the spirit of Schoenberg and, to a lesser extent, Stravinsky. Sometimes the antagonism between those two seems to be continuing here in a conflict between harmonic and rhythmic forces, both powerful. More simply from Schoenberg Mr. Wuorinen takes up the challenge of lively instrumental counterpoint that conveys the harmony but also slightly dislocates it, and thereby energizes it.

    This must be exciting music to dance to. Saturday’s splendid performances showed that it is also exciting music to play and to hear. "The Great Procession" is an arch centered on a slow declamation, elaborated partly canonically. The first of the flanking scherzos has great power, raging into an abrupt loud drum thwack (Mr. Wuorinen’s fondness for such endings shows an appealing enjoyment of blatant effect) that leaves a high violin tone as echo. A stomp is heard several times as a refrain: perhaps twice would be enough in the concert piece.

    "The River of Light," for a larger group, plays continuously, and works its way steadily forward through slow and fast tempos that are occasionally superimposed. At the end comes a majestic melody sustained by strings and woodwinds in unison, with supports and prevarications from piccolo and a ringing percussion section. Mr. Wuorinen’s vision of worlds to come generally has no hint of spirituality, but here he touches the awesomeness of Messiaen.

     -Paul Griffiths