INSTITUTE ORCHESTRA AT UCLA

Any musical training organization that wants to be counted must devote at least one concert per session to contemporary music. De rigueur. And never let it be said that the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute does not want to be counted.

So when its orchestra assembled Wednesday at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, the obligation was met. Never mind that under former institute director Michael Tilson Thomas more than one such event materialized.

New Music ’86 came under the ministrations of John Harbison, the Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence. Understandably, it managed to be as much a showcase for his own music as any other.

But, strangely, he seemed to be making an apologia in his introductory remarks. Not for the two Harbison works listed, but for the Schoenberg and Ives entries--based on their not being “new” in the strictest sense.

Harbison needn’t have been concerned. His own beautifully crafted, vibrant music stays within safely conservative limits. An innocent might even get the chronology confused--for even at this late date the nose-thumbing Ives and iconoclastic Schoenberg turn things upside down.

Ironically, we often end up looking backward to hear truly daring and provocative music.

Not only did Harbison put himself in exalted company--always a plus--he also gave his charges a needed challenge and a balanced bill of fare.

His Concerto for oboe, clarinet and strings made a smartly rousing opening and gave the roughly 25 players a grateful chance to run a full-out sonic-expressive gamut.

There was plenty to captivate the ear: big, robust orchestral tuttis that hewed to strict rhythmic structures, that paid homage to Stravinskyan short phrases and countered these with lushly Romantic long ones.

There was also contrast, with a melancholy slow movement redolent of Shostakovich. But the finale, marked Furioso, didn’t muster anything more than bustling in the hands of conducting fellow George Robert Hanson, nor did Hanson cut through a certain opaqueness. Still, oboist William Wielgus and clarinetist Patricia Hecker rode their variously argumentative, perky solos above the orchestra with poise.

Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, played here in a skeleton version of the full-complement original, and led by Harbison, came across with their marvelous stringency intact--some of the time.

Harbison also conducted his Music for 18 Winds, a full-bodied, brass-dominated essay with its Americana roots clearly established. It made a nice preface for the Yankeeisms of Ives’ “Three Places in New England,” which, in Michael Stern’s hands, was a little logy at first but finally conjured up its mysterious-to-cheeky-to-nostalgic landscape.