Art & Music and cellphones

Having dumped its celebrated new music series -- the Monday Evening Concerts -- this season, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is now left trying to reinvent the wheel. It did so clumsily in the first of its new Art & Music concerts Thursday night. But I have good news to report. The spirit of MEC survives and possibly thrives.

MEC is not dead. It is to be revived with a splendid new energy and invention, beginning next month at REDCAT. Meanwhile LACMA’s new series brought to the Bing Theater a terrific 4-year-old Italian group, the MDI Ensemble Milano, with a program of mostly recent and exciting music from Milan.

LACMA concerts are now saddled with the pedestrian mandate to relate to the museum’s art exhibitions. This one got stuck with “Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion From the Permanent Collection.” But the imaginative solution was to seek out young players from Milan (who, naturally, dress well) led by a Japanese conductor (who, naturally, also dresses well).

Another solution was to add diverting, if superfluous, choreography to two works on the program. The local Hysterica Dance Company was a guest Thursday as well.

Sure enough, the concert attracted a new, fashionable audience, though one clearly better versed in the creations of Armani and Yamamoto than in the music of Sandro Gorli and Fausto Romitelli. Many left early and noisily when they found out just what kind of music they had come to hear. Cellphones rang. Conversations took place, audibly, just outside the doors.

But had all the old-time new-musickers (many MEC supporters have withdrawn their support from LACMA) shown up, even they wouldn’t have had much of a notion of what was going on. There were no notes about unfamiliar music, only lengthy bios of musicians too young to have lengthy bios.

The six-member MDI is essentially the “Pierrot ensemble” of violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano that Schoenberg used for “Pierrot Lunaire” with an added viola. Its founder, Yoichi Sugiyama, a superb Japanese conductor living in Milan, has been making his name conducting various new music ensembles in Europe.

Hovering over the evening was the spirit of Franco Donatoni, a restless, probing, sometimes wacky, sometimes deeply depressing, ever facile experimenter who died in 2000 and had a huge impact on Italian and European music as composer and teacher (Esa-Pekka Salonen was among his pupils). His “L’ultima sera,” with a text made up of fragments from poetry by Fernando Pessoa, featured the excellent local soprano, Kathleen Roland, as guest artist in a nervous, scattered, interesting, complex score, performed with arresting attention to detail.

The music by the other, lesser-known Milanese composers was all influenced by Donatoni but also revealed a new direction on the Italian scene. Stefano Gervasoni, in “AN (Quasi una serenata con la complicita),” played with sounds on the edge of audibility (only to be interrupted by loud cellphone Debussy). Gorli’s “La stanza segreta” featured sputtering winds backed up by mellow strings and piano. Alessandro Solbiati’s “Sestetto a Gerard” erupted, settled down into luminous long tones and then erupted again.

Four strong dancers, choreographed by Kitty McNamee and Bubba Carr, vividly twitched when Emanuele Casale’s “Composizione per 5 strumenti” vividly twitched. The dance was more trivial if still watchable in its attempt to find a narrative emotional center to Romitelli’s abstract spectral sounds in “La sabbia del tempo.”

Maybe I simplify in suggesting that what Italian music has in common with Italian fashion is physical allure. But on Thursday these astonishingly competent young players demonstrated that they could turn the faint scraping of bow on violin string or a percussive piano chord into glamorous, dramatically charged sonic gestures.

Peyman Farzinpour, who now directs LACMA’s new music programs, has a lot to learn (including checking the spellings of composers’ names on the program and brochure). But he did his homework in finding MDI Ensemble Milano.

And maybe old-time new-musickers have a thing or two to learn as well. Encountering such music without knowing much about it (the few remarks from the stage weren’t especially helpful) can be refreshing, especially when the sounds themselves are fresh and fascinating.

mark.swed@latimes.com