Eighth blackbird flies

The sextet eighth blackbird wins extravagant praise everywhere it goes, and the reason was apparent Saturday night at UCLA. These are exceptional young musicians with a real flair for performance. Their specialty is making music of our moment come to life.

In this case, the players turned to composers their own age -- about 30 -- and demonstrated a remarkable commitment and spunky imagination, performing difficult scores from memory. Liberated from music stands, they romped around the Schoenberg Hall stage, free as jazz musicians, earnestly purposeful as performance artists. One watched and listened captivated.

Captivated, that is, by flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion and piano. Although eighth blackbird would like to see itself as following in the footsteps of the Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a Can All Stars, it lacks one essential element that has motivated these groups -- a taste for, and talent for, discovering novel and adventurous music.

Saturday’s program, “di/- verge,” consisted of new works commissioned in 2001 from a New York-based composers’ collective, Minimum Security. Despite their name, the first thing these four young composers did, in accepting the commission for a quartet of four-movement works, was to reach for a harmonic security blanket. Given that eighth blackbird had the lively idea of mixing up the 16 movements, mosaic-like, the composers decided to use as their collective starting point the distinctive chord that opens -- and recurs throughout -- Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, a neoclassical work written nearly a half-century before they were born.

The most abrasive and least conventional composer, Ken Ueno, created a study in sonority that included some excitingly obsessive hammered rhythms and loudly grating sounds. But he also opened one short movement of “Pharmakon” by having the performers engage in performer chatter, a gesture too trivial to even serve as a wink to the Fluxus experiments of the early ‘60s.

Not warm enough wrapped in Stravinsky’s chord, Roshanne Etezady based a movement of her “Damaged Goods” on Stephen Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By,” producing an amicable, atmospheric play on the first notes of the song that could be played in the background at Starbucks without anyone quite noticing.

The song on Adam B. Silverman’s mind was the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” in tribute to the ensemble’s name. The opening movement of his “In Another Man’s Skin” went so far as to present an insipid variant of the tune in the piano over the original background that sounded like an early sketch of the song. Dennis DeSantis’ “Powerless” contained the spunkiest music, and it gave the players the best opportunity to parade about the stage and interact. But even it was a study in caution. One premise of the piece was that when things started to go interestingly out of hand, the percussion came in and hammered on woodblocks to calm everyone down.

For the presentation of these four scores, eighth blackbird added its own creative input, producing a kind of narrative out of the 16 movements in two 35-minute segments, each half of the concert played straight through without breaks. There was helpful variety in skipping around between composers, in breaking up the scores, but the ensemble favored obvious strategies, such as by ending the first half with Silverman’s sappy pseudo “Blackbird” much like a Broadway show with the big tune at the end.

Still, it’s a great group. Its members -- Molly Alicia Barth, Michael J. Maccaferri, Matt Albert, Nicholas Photinos, Matthew L. Duvall and Lisa Kaplan -- are uniformly strong musicians, and the ensemble playing is always gripping. They make a sassy stage picture, not only in their dramatic interaction (working with a real theater person would be an excellent next step) and casual Saturday-night-out attire, studied in the women, less so in the men.

But they are a little too stuck on themselves. Their first commercial CD is just out, and it contains what they call their signature piece, written by violinist Matt Albert’s father, Thomas Albert. “Thirteen Ways” is not only one of the more unremarkable settings of Wallace Stevens’ poem, it, too, quotes the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”

At the moment, eighth blackbird feels as though it is the ultimate spectacular security blanket for too many mediocre or bland composers. If it really wants to follow in the footsteps of Kronos or the All Stars, it will need to reverse priorities, putting the music before the performance.