MUSIC REVIEW : N.Y. New Music Ensemble: Shortsighted Thorniness

The New York New Music Ensemble brought four contemporary American chamber pieces to the latest Monday Evening Concert at the L.A. County Art Museum, all together making up a program remarkable for its thorniness and shortsightedness.

Each one of these pieces, by Wayne Peterson, Louis Karchin, David Liptak and Charles Wuorinen, would have been better served had it been placed next to a friendlier, less recalcitrant work. A little Stravinsky or Bartok would have gone a long way in improving this program.

As it was, the concert, in Bing Theater, became an almost unremitting barrage of super-saturated musical information, well played by these talented advocates to be sure, but hardly effective, let alone compelling, in impact.

Liptak’s “Rhapsodies” for piano, violin, cello, clarinet and flute, seemed the most lovable piece on the agenda. The composer works engagingly with the repetition of non-minimalistic patterns to create both drive and dreaminess. In its third and final movement there is even a suggestion of Scottish dance amid the generally spacey, acerbic and ostinato-laden environment.

Wuorinen’s “Fortune” proves a typically kaleidoscopic offering from its creator. In two parts marked “Before” and “After,” the 18-minute work continually speeds up and activates, starting in a spare atmosphere and Brahmsian tonality and ending in a frenetic, rhythmically shifting tumble.

Peterson’s “Labyrinth” and Karchin’s “Galactic Folds” had too much complication up their sleeves to take in with a single listening, but didn’t pass the Virgil Thomson test of making us want to hear them again.