Celebration of American New Music

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the New York-based Speculum Musicae is among the more venerable ensembles in American New Music circles. The group has been advocating contemporary music long enough to see the 20th century dwindle from its middle years into its waning moments. Who better, then, to give a broad perspective of the era?

In the main, the group’s Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art surveyed the musical century in the great middle. The one exception was Rand Steiger’s “Woven Serenhade,” a 1991 work whose rhythmic vitality counterbalances a fairly arid and tired harmonic rhetoric. Strangely enough, it seemed out of place in this old-new music program.

The evening’s highlight was the String Quartet No. 4 (“Music of the Fair”) by Silvestre Rivueltas, the legendary Mexican composer deserving of wider recognition, especially here--given our geographical proximity to Mexico. Violinists Curtis Macomber and Carol Zeavin, violist Maureen Gallagher and cellist Christopher Finckel gave a spirited reading of the composer’s house blend of folk-like themes and expressionistic elements, suggesting a fair run amok.

Los Angeles-based pedagogue Ingolf Dahl’s 1947’s “Concerto a tre” is hardly an original piece, stitched as it is from the idealistic rusticity of Copland and Stravinsky in his pastoral mood, but it’s an attractive piece that culminates in a flurry of wit. Alban Berg’s eloquent Adagio (1935) was given its angst-drenched due, and Copland’s Sextet--a pared-down version of his “Short Symphony”--closed the concert with a rhythmically intricate bang, all the stronger for its intimate, compacted boldness.

Throughout, the players’ ensemble delivered a kind of no-nonsense clarity and made the music sing. It was a rich-blooded affair, celebrating a fine little century making its way into history.