SEASON FINALE FOR MONDAY CONCERTS

Monday Evening Concerts ended its 1985-86 season with a whimper . . . and a wheeze and a blurt and a spurt. It also staggered and limped to a close.

But that’s not the worst of what happened this week at the Bing Theatre of the County Museum of Art, scene of the formerly prestigious series.

Once again, contemporary music has earned a bad rap. Once again, the myopics holding the reins have led a critically dwindling audience down the path of no return. Once again, directorial heads have allowed their inverted sense of experimentalism to obscure the heart of the communicative matter.

This time, however, the chief culprit was not Dorrance Stalvey, at whose invitation the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players made its appearance Monday--it was the invitees themselves.

The agenda they brought looked promising on paper. It had an international profile. It had illuminating program notes (a rarity these days at MEC) that augured for an engaging experience.

But interest began to wane early on. After Boulez’s glittering “Derive” (1984), a thinned-out “Eclat” that alternated rippling arpeggios with single-note stasis, things went steadily, cumulatively downhill.

After two hours it seemed as though the program had been designed to enhance the idea of aural constipation. It no longer mattered that the earnest, eight-member group, conducted by Jean-Louis LeRoux and looking like proper businessmen and women, played with refinement and technical mastery.

Taken together, works by Toshio Hosokawa, Wayne Peterson, Richard Meale and Wolfgang Rihm stimulated nothing more than impatience. Rihm’s “Chiffre IV” consisted of a chord, a note, then the same played long, then short, then a few short notes strung together. Imagine the three earlier installments.

One could count maybe 50 die-hards who stayed to the end of the concert, and they all deserved a medal for dedication. Isn’t there anyone out there who still cares?