Funny how concerts grow and change in front of your ears, upturning expectations.

Tuesday, I attended the California Symphony's season-ending concert in Walnut Creek, expecting the night's news to be generated by Mason Bates, the 31 year-old composer with a parallel career as Masonic, a dance club DJ and electronica artist. Bates, from Oakland, is developing a critical mass of important commissions: from the San Francisco Symphony, Chanticleer and the National Symphony Orchestra, to name just three.

He is the California Symphony's "Young American Composer-In-Residence," as well, so it stood to reason that the world premiere of his "Sounds from Underground Spaces" was the reason, the only reason, to spend Tuesday night at the Lesher Center for the Arts. Especially with Carl Orff's overblown "Carmina Burana" on the second half of the program at the Hoffman Theatre; who would want to hear that again?

You can probably guess where this is headed.

Bates's new piece, which featured the composer performing on his laptop in the percussion section, turned out to be a pretty timid electro-acoustic experiment.

Then, after intermission, out rushed the full-blooded "Carmina Burana," Orff's setting of medieval poems about love, drinking, sex and springtime.

"Carmina," to be frank, began abysmally, with gruel-thin and rhythmically insecure contributions from the Oakland Symphony Chorus. But, gradually, it was pulled together by

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conductor Barry Jekowsky, a poised and persistent leader, and the performance was finally cemented into place by the three young soloists, especially baritone Keith Phares, whose voice is as refreshing as a long, cool draught of mead, or whatever monks drank in Bavarian abbeys of old.

After Phares' entrance, you could feel the orchestra tightening its performance, coming together in response to the contagious conviction and rounded beauty of his singing. Soprano Kiera Duffy was less charismatic; still, her voice was bell-pure and seemed filled with light. Tenor Tyler Nelson was less technically secure; he had problems with Orff's crazy-high top notes. But you could see what mattered in his eyes: he cared. Everyone did.

Up popped the Contra Costa Children's Chorus Honors Choir, fresh and heartfelt. The Oakland chorus did all it could to get behind Orff's seductive melodies and propelled rhythms. The performance, which began as a yawn, became a giant shout of communal music making.

Bates's short suite, about 15 minutes in total, was meager by comparison.

"Music from Underground Spaces" — also performed Sunday — unfolds in four movements, each segueing to the next without pause.

It seeks to imagine and explore the secret underground sound worlds of "Tunnels" (the first movement, incorporating Bate's sampled sounds of New York subways); followed by an "Inferno" (mechanized and demonic, deep beneath the Earth's surface, Bates said in pre-concert remarks); then "Crystalline Cities" ("diamonds reflecting off the walls" of subterranean kingdoms); and finally "Tectonic Plates" (the soulful groans of the subsonic world where earthquakes are born).

A techno groove, emanating from Bates' laptop and channeled (at polite volume) through P.A. speakers, ran through much of the piece, surrounded by mostly delicate, often droning sounds. The glow of a mysterious underground sunrise, perhaps: falling flutes, the mournful suspended call of a trumpet, golden figurations from the harp. Then the liquid flutter-patter of electronica, mysterious swells of horns and rising strings, comforting amidst more long brass tones, hanging in the air, briefly frozen, aiming at something ecstatic, pulsing, then melting away.

The shadow of John Adams hung over much of it. Only, unlike Adams, Bates didn't dive into his materials, pushing and extending them. Ideas, frankly, seemed inadequately explored. There was little sense of seething magic, of subterranean processes and wonder. Even the electronic aspect was tepid: Why not actually bust out a beat? Smash it together with the full force of the orchestra? Risk sending some of the symphony patrons to the exits? Why not?

The piece lacked audaciousness. It was inoffensive. Bates is only 31. The world is waiting to hear what he's got in store. Let's hear it.

Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com.

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