Biographies don’t get much grimmer than that of the brilliant, out, and desperately unhappy French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier, savagely murdered in Paris in 1983, age 34, in what some thought was suicide by rough trade. Vivier’s style, which subsumed esoteric global influences past keeping track of, kept morphing constantly. The mandarin Hungarian György Ligeti proclaimed him “the most important and original composer of his generation.” Champions of his music single out his quest for transcendence, or, more simply, bliss—and his uncanny ability to attain it. Yet to mainstream audiences, Vivier remains an undiscovered country—worse, a country never even heard of. His debut at Carnegie Hall, still in his lifetime, was with one of 10 pieces on a mixed program by the Montreal Brass Quintet, performed on the upper-story second stage of Weill Hall. In 2010, underground in Zankel Hall, the American Composers Orchestra programmed another amuse-gueule on a menu of six small plates. Now, in a historic first, his half-hour symphony Siddhartha comes to Stern Auditorium, the venue people have in mind when they ask how to get to Carnegie Hall. (“Practice.”) Tellingly, it’s David Robertson and the pre-professional crackerjacks of the Juilliard Orchestra who have taken up the gauntlet. Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird completes the program. —Matthew Gurewitsch