A Mixture of the Thorny and the Smooth

With the eminent and unflappable New York New Music Ensemble on hand, young composers participating in the Cal State University summer arts program got the chance to hear their recent work performed by a professional chamber group Thursday at Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall at Cal State Long Beach.

A fair-sized crowd turned out for the opportunity as well, proving that even in summer many prefer their music indoors and difficult. For make no mistake, much of the music on display was thorny, complicated stuff and showed that for this generation all styles are fair game.

But, in general, it was the simpler music--works that didn’t try to cram too much information into too little space--that was most effective. Robert Zimmerman’s Bagatelles was the best example, especially its third movement, an evocation of a warm summer’s evening on a porch, wind chimes gently wafting--beautifully, sparely captured by glockenspiel, piano and violin.

Adriana Verdie de Vas Romero hit on the happy instrumental combination of clarinet and percussion in her “Kvarildanzal,” a lively, slippery, sometimes insinuating, sometimes shrieking mix of Argentine dance and modernistic doodling.

Three movements from Howard Yermish’s “Five Images” recalled paintings of Lichtenstein, Dali and Kandinsky effectively. His Dali movement caught the melting, nightmarish qualities of “Shades of Night Descending” with a lugubrious quasi-passacaglia bass line and all sorts of things rattling, booming and bumping in the night.

Program composer-in-residence Olly Wilson and conductor-for-the-evening Harvey Sollberger also had pieces performed. Wilson’s “A City Called Heaven” uses spiritual, blues and boogie-woogie as inspirational material, but deconstructs and reassembles them as practically incognito elements. Only their driving forces remain.

Sollberger’s “The Advancing Moment” carried heavy program-note baggage (his own), and indeed, for much of its course, seemed overburdened by the weight. It eventually settled down to aggressive hammering and amplified growling and honking, not an ineffective source of energy.