LACMA Concert Pairs the Remote and Romantic

East Coast composer Donald Martino taught New Yorker Mathew Rosenblum. So by pairing works by both men on a Monday Evening Concert program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York New Music Ensemble both played music of intrinsic interest and also illustrated what happened between two generations of American composers.

Martino, who was born in 1931, emerged as the meticulous formalist interested in 12-tone procedures--severe, remote, open to popular music influences but only by distilling them into echoes of themselves, as in the 1991 “Preludes: Part I,” played expertly by pianist Stephen Gosling.

Rosenblum, born in 1954 (and present to take bows), sounded more like a romantic wild card, expressive and more textured, unafraid of repeating himself, incorporating rock and gamelan music directly, and wittily embedding some “Prankquean” sequences from Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” amid querulous complaints in his 1997 “And how war yore maggies?” (texts read on tape by his wife, Maggie Lane).

But even Martino has his romantic side. His 1973 “Notturno,” despite its title, is no single textured soundscape, quiet and meditative. It is a fascinating and episodic night, in which things skitter and creep. There’s a loud party and a nostalgic recollection of a waltz. Darkness occurs in the spaces between events.

A group piece conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, “Notturno” demands such ensemble precision and coherence that the New York ensemble (which also includes flutist Jayn Rosenfeld, clarinetist Jean Kopperud, violinist Calvin Wiersma, cellist Christopher Finckel and percussionist Daniel Druckman) may be one of the few groups able to do it justice.