I know that the Florida Orchestra's programming of HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! was meant to be a tribute to the new Dali Museum, but Friday's performance at the Straz Center turned out to be more surreal than anybody expected. Gruber, the Austrian composer who was the soloist, could not be heard in the elaborate, poetic text, which he delivered while the orchestra played. Apparently, he mistakenly hit the mute button on his microphone, ruining the performance. You can read the review I wrote that night here.

In an unprecedented gesture of damage control, during intermission Friday the orchestra apologized for the "technical mishap'' and offered audience members free admission to the Saturday and Sunday concerts in St. Petersburg and Clearwater. I had previous engagements and was unable to hear Frankenstein!! done right, but orchestra president Michael Pastreich told me that quite a few people from Tampa did. I heard from several audience members that Gruber's performance went well.

Friday's fiasco was an understandable flub -- though you wonder why a stagehand or somebody on the orchestra staff didn't have the presence of mind to let Gruber or music director Stefan Sanderling (the two are pictured here in rehearsal) know there was a problem . They could have simply switched off the mute button and started over. Nobody in the audience would have minded. (Incidentally, it was a weekend of stage glitches. At the Saturday matinee of Wonderland at the Straz, the fire curtain came down in the middle of Act 1. They stopped the show, fixed the problem, and started the scene over.)

But I also must say that this is the second time in the past two seasons that a piece just a little out of the ordinary has confounded Sanderling and the orchestra. Last season, there was the fiasco involving the player piano solo for Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in which the orchestra was ill prepared for its role. And now the Frankenstein!! horror show. The orchestra needs to tighten up its act.

Photo: Edmund D. Fountain