MUSIC REVIEW : New York Ensemble at Museum

Without a doubt, the New York New Music Ensemble is a gem of a group. These musicians are alert, technically scrupulous, thoroughly prepared to the teeth--and, most notably for a new-music group, passionately expressive no matter how difficult or abstract the score.

Now comes the hard part: finding something worthwhile to play. On that count, only one of the four pieces heard at the group’s appearance Monday night in the Leo S. Bing Theater of the County Museum of Art--part of the Monday Evening Concerts series--had anything resembling coherence or emotional power. Luckily, it took up about half of the program.

The piece in question is Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Ave Maris Stella,” a mesmerizing, 27-minute, one-movement sextet that finds the composer again transforming the seascape beneath his home in the Orkney Islands into sound.

While all players take turns evoking the choppy seas in fragmented bursts, the textures change noticeably, and each section of the work is clearly defined. Inevitably, everything becomes magically still, with the alto flute simulating a distant foghorn.

Robert Black sensitively led a sextet that included ensemble members Daniel Druckman (marimba), Christopher Finckel (cello), Jean Kopperud (clarinet), Jayn Rosenfeld (alto flute) and guests Cyrus Stevens (violin) and James Winn (piano).

Particularly impressive was Finckel’s warm, lyrical solo at the beginning of “Ave Maris Stella” and the group’s amazingly hushed, delicate playing at a pianissimo volume level toward the close.

Poul Ruders’ “Vox in Rama” for clarinet, piano and amplified violin tries to travel the same route from agitation to calm in one-third the time--and the opening does have an appealing, quirky sense of syncopated violence. Yet where Maxwell Davies succeeds in imposing form and order over potential chaos, Ruders merely allows the momentum to drift away and the music just hangs there, waiting for a denouement that never arrives.

The program opened with MEC director Dorrance Stalvey’s “Exordium/Genesis/Dawn,” a shapeless canvas of brittle staccatos for the full sextet, relieved somewhat by a few lyrical interludes. Bun-Ching Lam’s arid “Another Spring” for piano, alto flute and cello also rambles aimlessly from episode to episode, busywork without point. For what it’s worth, both pieces, as well as the Ruders, were receiving their local premieres.