MUSIC REVIEW : A Bold, Vigorous Vinao in Museum Concert

Alejandro Vinao is not a household name here, even in households devoted to contemporary music. It may be before long, though, if he has more pieces as bold and substantial as the Triple Concerto played by the California E.A.R. Unit on Thursday evening at the County Museum of Art.

The 36-year-old, London-trained Argentinian seems to be a composer of both vigorous imagination and solid craft. His clearly shaped concerto encompasses brooding beauty, violent musical collisions and, under all the bravura effects, a confident sense of identity.

The amplified soloists--flutist Dorothy Stone, cellist Erica Duke, and pianist Gaylord Mowrey--were not kept terribly busy in the big work. Each dispatched a well-characterized cadenza with concentrated authority, and together they generated impressive energy--both musical and visceral--in the finale.

But computer-processed sounds carry the burden of the piece. For much of the opening, the live soloists simply punctuate the flashy tape part with manic Minimalistic ritornellos. Paradoxically, though, subservience to an electronic master here resulted in a work of passion and freedom.

Five relatively short, disparate pieces crowded together on the first half of the program, capped by Berio’s classic “Linea.” Percussionists Amy Knoles and Arthur Jarvinen, and pianists Lorna Eder and Mowrey underscored its kinetic impulses, while serving the sophisticated, quasi-folkloric tunefulness with equal skill and conviction.

The program boasted the putative U.S. premiere of Stockhausen’s “Dr. K--Sextet,” a 1969 birthday tribute to Alfred Kalmus. Bafflingly enough, seven E.A.R. Uniteers performed this obsessive, formulaic eight-part sextet, complete with jerky, mechanical doll shifts in playing posture.

Rand Steiger led the same seven in “Hebby Tenders” by Mary Wright, a CalArts alumna. The brief, splotchy piece proved mercifully more approachable than the composer’s program note.

The busy half began with Michael Torke’s peppy, quasi-Minimalistic quintet “The Yellow Pages,” which the Unit offered earlier this year at CalArts. It also included another E.A.R. Unit reprise: Eder, Jarvinen and Mowrey’s absurdist rendition of Sylvano Bussotti’s “Per tre.”