MUSIC REVIEW : N.Y. New Music Ensemble in Local Premieres of Works

The New York New Music Ensemble introduced two works locally on a five-part program in the Leo S. Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The program was part of the Monday Evening Concerts series.

Jacob Druckman’s 1992 “Come Round,” receiving its first Los Angeles performance, makes such intricate demands on the players that it was the only piece that required a conductor.

Robert Black led Jayn Rosenfeld, flute; Jean Kopperud, clarinet; James Winn, piano; Daniel Druckman, percussion; Linda Quan, violin, and Christopher Finckel, cello.

Written for the ensemble, the nearly 30-minute work is cast in three distinct sections separated by pauses. The middle is a dark, perhaps even doom-laden meditation; it is flanked by busier, more agitated parts.

In a program note, the composer writes that variation form pervades the whole, and a first hearing did reveal recurrences of short phrases, especially the “three successive trochees” he mentions. But for all its compelling drama, and doubtless a near-definitive reading, “Come Round” remained distant, thorny, mercurial and daunting.

In contrast, the other local premiere, Elizabeth Brown’s 1990 “The Memory Palace” for flute, cello and piano, impressed for its cool, sustained architecture--emerging from ascending stepwise patterns, but immediately freezing any forward motion in a suspension of recollected memories.

Joan Tower’s “Noon Dance” (1982) turned out to be a masterly full-ensemble study in layered and matched pale colors, and gathering, rhythmic passages of shifting, neo-Stravinskian accents. The work also gave each player virtuoso solo opportunities that emerged effortlessly from the complex textures.

As played by Quan and Winn, John Cage’s Six Melodies for Violin and Piano (1950) might rival Satie’s “Gymnopedies” for austere purity, although the wistful, folk-like flavor seems more rooted--to stick with the French composer for the analogy--in Satie’s “Gnossiennes.”

Kopperud proved reasonably steady and agile in Donald Martino’s 1954 jazz-derived “Set for Clarinet.”