MUSIC REVIEW : 3 World Premieres From Composers Assn.

The Los Angeles-based Independent Composers Assn. presented an engrossing and rewarding (though difficult) program of five contemporary works for small ensembles, including three world premieres, at the County Museum of Art, Wednesday night.

Steven Stucky, new music adviser to the L.A. Philharmonic, presided over the event as unflappable conductor and got things rolling with his own elegant “Boston Fancies” from 1985. Alternating fast, lean and linear “ritornellos” (the composer’s term) and slow, swirling and rhapsodical “fancies,” the work is cherishable for the graceful frothiness of its instrumental writing as well as for its direct, clear thought.

The world premieres on the program shared the same ensemble configuration, used resourcefully, of piano, percussion, woodwind trio, string trio and harp.

Stephen Cohn’s “Noah’s Rhythm” built up from quiet dawn through “beehive texture” to a rich edifice of leaping lines and long arches, and then turned around and went back again, reminiscing on the rebound and all the while offering attractive, glowing sonorities.

In “Pale Fire,” Burt Goldstein set up an insistent metronomic figure that kept disappearing beneath gushing, tumbling washes of ideas, only to appear again as they ebbed.

Donald R. Davis’ “What Is the Silence” unwound in a series of cogent movements unified by a returning segment of slow, hammered dissonances, fading, growing, viewed from different angles like a revolving sculpture of granite.

Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz’s “Trio dei Due Mondi,” for piano trio, proved thoroughly accessible in its eclecticism as well as delightfully episodic and enigmatic. Though one composer was overheard regretting the lack of more rehearsals, the ensembles one and all deported themselves honorably, enthusiastically and, apparently, capably.