MUSIC REVIEWS : Some Old Works Filtered Through a New Prism

At the outset of the New York New Music Ensemble’s Monday Evening Concert at the L.A. County Museum of Art, a somber note was struck as percussionist Daniel Druckman announced that the group’s founder, Robert Black, had died of cancer the night before.

In homage to Black, the program order was reconfigured to open with “Veni Sancte--Veni Creator Spiritus,” by Dunstable/Peter Maxwell Davies, a piece of which Black was fond.

Davies’ work also served as a reliable indicator of the agenda of the concert, under the title “Old Wine in New Bottles.” Like Davies’ reworking of Dunstable’s 15th-Century music, pieces by Charles Wuorinen and Harrison Birtwistle also reconsidered music of centuries past, filtered through a modernist prism.

While the early music in altered states proved an interesting angle for a new music program, the Ensemble--Druckman, cellist Christopher Finckel, clarinetist Jean Kopperud, violinist Linda Quan, flutist Jayn Rosenfeld, pianist Joseph Kubera and conductor David Gilbert--showed its finest mettle on 1993 works written for the Ensemble.

Evanescent flurries and meditative surfaces mark Ray Shattenkirk’s beguiling “Myadestes myadestinus,” a bittersweet meditation on an endangered Hawaiian bird. Richard Festinger’s sanguine “A Serenade for Six,” swerves persuasively from the rhythmic maze-like to the elegiac to sardonic whimsy. And with “Divine Detours,” C. Bryan Rulon inventively transforms his Medieval source material into a sonic dream world.

In his program notes, composer David Lang dared evoke the names of both Bach and James Brown--the king of the baroque meets the Godfather of soul--in explaining the dichotomous high/low exercise of his solo piece for bass clarinet, “Press Release.”

This was a night of meetings arranged across the centuries, much of it successfully.