Nimbus ‘Dialogues’ worth having

Not even a year old yet, the Nimbus Ensemble is starting to make a notable contribution to musical life here. Music director Young Riddle intelligently offsets old music with the new -- in some cases, very new -- and he has the advantage of playing in the acoustically superb Westwood United Methodist Church.

Sunday afternoon, the ensemble even made a bit of news, grabbing the West Coast premiere of one of the artifacts of Elliott Carter’s astonishing ongoing Indian summer, “Dialogues for Piano and Chamber Orchestra” (2003).

It’s not a concerto per se; it’s really a string of conversations in which the piano and orchestra talk to and sometimes against each other, often overlapping.

Atonal, abstract and gruff, rhythmically fragmented, dense but with room for listeners and performers to breathe, it is another uncompromising puzzle from a composer whose mind was lively enough at 94 to work it out. Pianist Nadia Shpachenko’s lidless instrument was placed to the right of the group, producing a watery tone that melded with the 18 instruments.

The Carter piece fit well within the concert’s umbrella title, “Musical Dialogues,” a conception that extended even into the program notes, where Riddle and his Nimbus associate Jeffrey Holmes engaged in a lofty dialogue of their own.

Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto was dragging in tempo, the rhythms lead-footed, the wit smoothed away. However, Riddle’s pace did allow us to savor the details in a great room that offered just enough reverberation, deep, tight bass and a pinpoint sense of where the instruments were placed.

Stravinsky was aptly paired with J.S. Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1, in which soloist Rebekka Hartmann adopted the swelling attacks of the period-performance school to a self-conscious degree. Yet Hartmann turned right around and played Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Sonata for Solo Violin with full modern tone and vibrato, brilliantly executing the obsessive trills.

The latter was another of Nimbus’ endearing, unbilled “mystery pieces.” But please, at least tell the audience the piece’s identity after its performance.