Music Reviews : Double Edge Plays Contemporary Works

Piano duos can cover a lot of ground, as evidenced by Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles, the accomplished and forward-leaning pianists who comprise the New York-based piano duo Double Edge.

At the duo’s appearance at the L.A. County Museum of Art, the ground covered wasn’t always safe or sublime. For all their finely tuned, almost telepathic collective efforts, the musical grist here wasn’t consistently worthy of the players’ gifts.

It all began promisingly enough, with the West Coast premiere of “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s obliquely wistful, aptly meandering ode to Route 66, “The De-Certified Highway of Dreams”--now folksy, now urbane.

Joan Tower’s “Love and Celebration,” lifted out of a ballet, seemed truncated, an intense finale taken out of context. Meredith Monk’s 1981 piece “Ellis Island” is a frilly meditation on a minor chord that, retroactively, veers too close to New Age music for comfort.

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Three movements from Messiaen’s “Visions de l’Amen” neatly captured that composer’s turbulence, reverence and ornithological sensuality. The duo’s version of “Tonk,” by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, spun with fast and crisply articulated notes, if lacking those unnotateable traits of swing or soul.

Two world premieres checked in on the state of minimalism. One sang, the other sank. Kevin Volans’ “Cicada” is a striking perceptual work that plays off of a gradual shifting of phrases, in which permutations refer to classic minimalism, minus the triadic colors and mechanistic patterns.

No such luck with David Borden’s bland “The Infinity Variations, Part Two,” in which the pianists’ efforts were mismatched with banal synthesized sounds on tape. Too-familiar minimalistic babble conjured visions of subdividing cells, assembly-line work and data-bits dancing in beguiling, meaningless circles.

And so it went Monday, a mixture of the inspired with the tired, the fresh with the stale. Throughout, however, the players dispatched with edge and elegance.