Boston Musica Viva Traces Musical Roots

At age 28, Boston Musica Viva is one of the burnished veterans in the ranks of American new music ensembles and, sure enough, the group delivered quietly commanding skill and commitment in concert Monday at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Apart from the sheen of the playing, it presented a well-designed program on the themes of cross-cultural instincts and tracing one’s musical roots.

The program was also framed by works from composers based in Los Angeles and in the same household. Joan Huang is married to William Kraft. Her compelling “Yellow Land” flings a simple Chinese folk tune into a bubbling caldron of Western modernist gestures. The theme reemerges in different guises and textures, like a resilient rural tune battling harsh urban realities.

Kraft’s Concerto for Percussion and Chamber Ensemble proceeds on a similar trajectory: a simple fife and drum tune plays against the post-serial fabric of 20th century music, with a tour de force performance by BMV’s gifted percussionist Dean Anderson.

Another strong piece was Argentine-born composer Jorge Liderman’s “Notebook”; a mosaic loosely based on the influence of Moroccan Jewish music, it’s a beguiling little suite of fragments.

Not every piece here worked seamlessly. Shulamit Ran’s “Mirage” rambled on with a dryly academic syntax. Evan Ziporyn’s “Dreams of a Dominant Culture” takes its inspiration from gamelan music, with its rippling, non-hierarchical structures, but winds up in a mode of baggy-fit minimalism, that new Americana.

Americana of an older-yet-irreverent bent came courtesy of five Charles Ives songs, rearranged for chamber ensemble by director Richard Pittman and sung beautifully by mezzo-soprano Janice Felty. A little bit of well-rendered Ives goes a long way, and the strange mixture of wistfulness and iconoclasm made this 100-year-old music sound as if it were born yesterday, in the best sense.