New Music Ensemble Plays Inspiring, Revelatory Program

The ranks of new music ensembles of any venerability is slender, indeed. Rarer still is a gifted group like the New York New Music Ensemble, a ripened and uncompromising 23-year-old keeper of the new music flame. Thankfully, it has made Monday Evening Concerts a perennial tour stop, and this week’s 14th Southland appearance at the L.A. County Museum of Art demonstrated the group’s tough, crusader business-as-usual attitude.

The first half of the concert, dubbed “Our Millennium Music,” opened auspiciously, with George Perle’s wonderfully acrid-yet-spry “Critical Moments.” Spun off of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” but minus a vocal part, it’s all about beguiling brevity and precise detailing, a good showcase for the group’s exacting touch.

Rules of musical conduct seem to dictate that every new music concert has at least one world premiere, and here, the group unveiled David Liptak’s “Janus Variations.” It’s a seamlessly designed, stylistically varied 12-part work, with a moody waltz nodding to Satie nestled amid more abstract material. The jury is still out on its ultimate cogency.

Lines of musical conversation cross over, smartly, in Ross Bauer’s “Tributaries,” for cello, piano and percussion. Feisty, interactive writing is key--one musician finishes another’s sentence, and all exude a seductive restlessness beneath the neatly structured surface.

After intermission, the program turned toward the UK and retooled early music. Harrison Birtwistle’s “Ut Heremita Solus” reconsiders music of 15th century composer Johannes Ockegham, accenting the strangely kindred spirit of early and modern music, each with their rigorous mechanics and dearth of romantic excess.

Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Ave Maria Stella,” a 1975 work with 9th century roots, is more a statement of our time. Surging waves of energy ripple across the ensemble, breaking for a dynamic marimba solo from percussionist Daniel Druckman. Repose yields to tension and back, in the piece, and, likewise, in this inspiring, no-nonsense program.