Concert Crosses Idiomatic Borders

This season’s bounty of worthy new music continued Monday night with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players making its annual appearance at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Directed by Stephen L. Mosko, the well-honed, well-intentioned ensemble has established itself as one of the West Coast’s finest new music crusaders, and it didn’t disappoint in the Monday Evening Concerts series.

The thematic glue that connected the five pieces on the program had to do with music that crosses idiomatic borders, without fear or post-modern glibness.

Oliver Knussen’s “Cantata” extracted an air of mournful longing and a fractured sense of continuity, with oboist William Banovetz as its expressive protagonist. The late great Witold Lutoslawski’s 1992 “Subito” found violinist Roy Malan deftly negotiating a dynamic and attitudinal slalom course, in and out of tonal terrain.

James Tenney, recently heard in the Green Umbrella series, was represented by his moving, strangely contemplative “Cognate Canons.” Dedicated to the heroic player-piano composer Conlon Nancarrow, it emphasizes polytempos, with irregular phrases that alternately intersect and ignore each other.

Although written in 1979, the Piano Sonata No. 6 of 103-year-old composer Leo Ornstein had its premiere only recently, at the hands of pianist Martin Tartak. The formidable pianist reprised the piece here, for all its bombastic neo-Romantic worth, giving a muscular reading to a work that declines all subtlety and winds up an enervating muddle.

Closing the program on a brighter note, Frederic Rzewski’s “Whimwhams,” for the not-so-odd-couple pairing of string quartet and percussionist, reveled in cock-eyed whimsy and sly fragmentation. It proved a fine showcase for the intrepid Bay Area-based percussionist William Winant.