blanketed the city this past year is the exposure to musics from various cultures that create a hybrid of national traditions with Western art music.

Some of these works, including large-scale ones written seemingly by committee in the People's Republic of China, come off as little more than movie music or forced combinations. But many others -- particularly from other parts of the Far East and from Latin America -- explore very inviting inspirations and combinations of sound.

Wednesday night at the Grant Park Music Festival a program of three unusual Grant Park premieres was fascinating and Friday and Saturday night will see principal conductor Carlos Kalmar, himself a native of Uruguay, return to lead three Cuban and Venezuelan works new to summer audiences as well as a rarely performed Brazilian classic by Villa-Lobos.

The young Thai-Chinese composer Narong Prangcharoen has had a remarkable dual education in Bangkok and at two Midwest schools, including Illinois State University where he now teaches. His nine-minute "Phenomenon . . . The Mysterious and the Unexplained" was written for the Tokyo Philharmonic in 2004 and is absolutely captivating -- an explosion of orchestral colors, using only Western instruments, that is a sort of Southeast Asian version of Stravinsky's own brief early composition "Fireworks." I would absolutely want to hear anything else by this talented young man.

Chinese-born Oscar winner Tan Dun straddles the soundtrack and serious compositional worlds, literally. In my experience, the longer his pieces, the more we have a sense that Ol' Man Yellow River just keeps unoriginally rollin' along. But his ten-minute "Dragon and Phoenix Overture" to his bulky hour-long

"Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind" is a good distillation of Eastern and Western styles and forms. The concert-closing performance, especially with the

enthusiastic members of the colorfully attired Glen Ellyn Children's Chorus, well prepared by their director Emily Ellsworth, was also stirring.

In between came a strange work, more talked about than performed, by a composer who was himself an often uncomfortable hybrid of his contrasting Italian and German ancestry. Ferrucio Busoni's 1905 "Turandot Suite," Op. 41, preceded -- and helped to inspire -- Puccini's much more famous "Chinese" opera on the same story by some 20 years. Passages of this 40-minute set of scenes reveal how "the East" could and can look to Western eyes. Bu they alternate with bizarre sections such as that with the imperial Ice Princess being dressed by her maids to the English folk tune "Greensleeves" followed by an approximation of an Arabian dance. The Grant Park audience can now say that it heard the work, and very well played by Kalmar and the orchestra.

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7)