No composer ever did more with less than Morton Feldman. While other composers built elaborate and ornate structures out of blocks of sound, he created equally elaborate - and equally beautiful - scores out of whispers, silences and implications.

In Davies Symphony Hall on Wednesday night, Michael Tilson Thomas introduced "Rothko Chapel," one of Feldman's richest and most haunting works, to the San Francisco Symphony repertoire. The piece is a virtuoso display of minimalist lyricism, and the few performers onstage gave it a mesmerizing performance. Recommended Video

Written in 1971 for the opening of the interfaith chapel in Houston built around Mark Rothko's paintings, "Rothko Chapel" marks a confluence of several strains in Feldman's work. As ever, the rhetoric is subdued, the tempos slow, the textures sparse and suggestive, and the instrumentation - for solo viola, chorus, percussion and celesta - is a determinative feature of the piece.

But there are other elements in play as well that tie the music directly to its setting. The viola, which is clearly a protagonist and emotional stand-in for the composer, relocates physically to different parts of the stage, adding a spatial dimension to the music.

"Rothko Chapel" is also more explicitly sectional than many of Feldman's works, conjuring up an image of Rothko's paintings being looked at one by one (shades of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"). And Feldman's writing - particularly the gentle block chords sung by the chorus, which Thomas aptly likened to a cross between Webern and Duke Ellington - is a correlative in sound to Rothko's fields of color, with their solid centers and vaporous edges.

The performance (even in the face of several disruptive bursts of coughing from the audience) was superb, at once urgent and serene. Jonathan Vinocour, the Symphony's fine principal violist, wore the hero's mantle with winning grace, playing the solo part expressively but modestly. The Symphony Chorus, led by Ragnar Bohlin, mustered a gently colored sound, and percussionist Jack Van Geem, timpanist David Herbert and keyboardist Robin Sutherland made admirable contributions.

As an apt counterpoint to the spiritual overtones of the Feldman, there was Mozart's Requiem, in a performance marked by some moments of finesse and grandeur. The Symphony Chorus shone in a fluid account of the "Lacrymosa," and principal trombonist Timothy Higgins delivered an elegant solo in the "Tuba Mirum."

But much of the performance seemed caught in an uncertain struggle between the lightness of the Feldman and the weightiness that these big liturgical works can often boast. When Thomas let the piece thunder forth unabashedly, as in the "Dies Irae" or the concluding "Cum sanctis tuis," the results were impressive, but more transparent sections often sounded scrappy or diffuse. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke was the clear standout in a quartet of vocal soloists that also included soprano Kiera Duffy, tenor Bruce Sledge and bass-baritone Nathan Berg.

As a touching and appropriate curtain-raiser, Bohlin led the chorus in "Lacrimosa," a 1994 gloss on that movement of the Mozart by Lithuanian composer Mindaugas Urbaitis. Its sweetly ripping harmonies, swelling to a culminating quote from the Mozart, made a telling effect.

San Francisco Symphony: 8 p.m. today-Sat. Davies Symphony Hall, S.F. $15-$140. (415) 864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.