MUSIC REVIEW : New, Uneven Fare From E.A.R. Unit

In the fiercely partisan world of new music, the California E.A.R. Unit stands out for its eclectic inspiration, presenting works from Cage to Carter with undiscriminating conviction.

Wednesday, the 10-year-old ensemble opened its residency series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with a typically multifaceted, uneven program of premieres in Bing Theater.

“All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis” is the final installment in Morton Subotnick’s trilogy of “imaginary ballets” based on the collage novels of Max Ernst. The Unit gave the world premiere of the music this summer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and it is scheduled for a choreographic interpretation--by John Alleyne--this month at the National Ballet of Canada.

Large in aspiration and formidable in interactive technology, “Hummingbirds” seems somehow less than the sum of its frequently dramatic parts. The mythic nature of the portentous spoken lines was more apparent in the program notes than in the performance, and the computer manipulations sounded arbitrary, often creating little more than a generalized industrial sonic haze.

At least “Hummingbirds” has the courage to try to communicate. Charles Amirkhanian’s elaborately staged, textless playlet, “His Anxious Hours: Somnisoniferences of Johannes Brahms,” seems content with coy, symbolic gamesmanship. Hoping perhaps to acquire meaning through accretion, Amirkhanian repeats a series of dazed aural and gestural gambits in a formalized absurdist ritual.

Both performances, local premieres under the composers’ guidance, appeared to do justice to the material. Six pajama-clad Uniteers wandered around Amirkhanian’s candle-lit bedroom set, Gloria Cheng playing Brahms’ E-flat Intermezzo while Arthur Jarvinen built a wooden box. The mundane vs. the aesthetic? Six sleepwalkers in search of antacid?

Cheng, percussionist Amy Knoles, flutist Dorothy Stone and cellist Erika Duke applied much bravura and concentration to “Hummingbirds.” Duke broke a string midway through, but the performance resumed with, if anything, greater intensity.

Stone also offered the world premiere of “None but the Lonely Flute,” an uncharacteristically mellow effusion from Milton Babbitt. Rife with comprehendable repeated motifs, the short lyrical work was delivered with unobtrusive virtuosity.

Beginning the concert was Eve Beglarian’s “Machaut in the Machine Age I,” a soft, post-minimalist adaptation for the full ensemble of a motet by Machaut.