MUSIC REVIEW : S.F. Contemporary Players Serve Up a Mix of Old, New

According to the program notes for its Monday Evening Concert at the L.A. County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players is, at 19 years, the “oldest ensemble in the West dedicated to performing, commissioning and recording contemporary chamber music.” That claim says as much about the fragility of new music ensembles as it does about the venerability of this still-teen-aged organization.

In a carefully diversified program Monday night, a wide range of historical and stylistic reference points confirmed the idea that contemporary music ain’t what it used to be.

The concert opened cannily with Norwegian composer Ase Hedstrom’s “Sorti” (1987), a hypnotic, atonal tableau. Lou Harrison’s “Songs in the Forest,” written in 1951 but revived by the composer in 1991, is a modest, lilting work, with a characteristically Asian orientation.

Composer David Lang, a native Angeleno who has gone on to head up the New York City “Bang on a Can” festival, had percussionist William Winant banging on a mutated drum set for Lang’s “Anvil Chorus,” working up an engaging lather of machine-like ritual.

Tonality ruled the second half, albeit tonality with an attitude. Estonian composer Arvo Part’s poignant 1992 work, Adagio, taps elliptically into early Romantic parlor music, rather than into the expected Medieval influence.

By far the oldest new music on Monday was Copland’s Sextet, the 1932 symphony tooled down to a manageable chamber work in 1937. Copland’s reputation as a populist is a lingering misconception now being subjected to revision.

Yes, we get images of locomotives, turbines and twilight Appalachian vistas courtesy of the open, yearning harmonies and chugging rhythmic cadences in the Coplandscape. But we also get an ingenious marshaling of musical forces into a sinewy, cautiously optimistic construct.

The group played with a neatly dressed articulation disguising a bounding, almost roughneck, energy. The players seemed to understand that this is a work urbane and rural, sophisticated and wondrously vulgar, all at once. And, although 40 years older than the group itself, it sounded like the most contemporary piece of the lot. What’s new--and sounds new--is constantly subject to change.