Want to get youth vote? Here’s how

There are many foolish attempts to change concert life, such as surveying young people who aren’t interested in classical music about what bait would draw them in. Say we served pizza in cellphone-friendly concert halls, installed sofas and video screens, and guaranteed that no “song” would last more than five minutes? What if we made that gourmet pizza and supplied a fine Gewurztraminer to wash it down? Free iPhones to the first 50 who log on to our website?

But over the weekend, five serious young women gave two remarkable concerts here, and they weren’t responding to surveys. These exceptional virtuosos have their own ideas about breaking down concert barriers. Resourceful revolutionaries, they don’t ask and don’t pander but insist on change. And by devising authentic new ways to concertize that feel right for them and their times, they proved magnets for the young.

Saturday afternoon at SCI-Arc, the hip architecture school downtown, a girl-group recorder collective from Germany made its Los Angeles debut as part of the classy Chamber Music in Historic Sites series. The ensemble, Quartet New Generation, was provocative enough to entice fledgling designers away from their computers.

Then, Sunday afternoon at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero spent half of her recital for the classy Philharmonic Society improvising. Little girls went running up to the stage asking her to play things. Although she didn’t fill the hall in Irvine, Montero is on her way to celebrity. Her recent CD of improvisations on classical themes is a bestseller. It’s also somewhat bland in a brunch-music kind of way, which made her compelling recital all the more surprising.

For the first half, Montero played Schumann’s “Carnaval” and Alberto Ginastera’s First Sonata with a bold, muscular willfulness. Her tone is big and lustrous -- I’d never heard a piano sound so loud in this hall.

“Carnaval” is a series of character pieces. Pierrot pranced as I’d never known him to prance before. Eusebius’ dreams were private, inscrutable. Not everything worked for me, but headstrong freshness gets a listener’s attention. In Ginastera’s sonata, written by the Argentine composer in 1951, Montero was on percussive fire.

But the improvisations after intermission were the heart of the afternoon. Seated cross-legged at the piano, Montero asked for themes on which to improvise. “Happy Birthday” caught her fancy, and she took the tune on a tour from Bach to Haydn to Beethoven to something Latin. The so-called Albinoni Adagio had a similar, but more ornate, trajectory.

A little girl asked for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Beginning with dotted rhythms, Montero hesitated, lost her way, turned intense, probing as if consumed by a late Beethoven slow movement, then a blues, then an agitated Schubert song.

Another little girl ran to the stage and sang a theme from Bach’s “Italian Concerto.” This became French Impressionism. Montero’s improvisations sometimes feel stuck in classical tradition, but her defiant streak usually wrests them free. She simply plays how she feels.

On the other hand, QNG, as the recorder quartet calls itself, attacks tradition. The four women played nothing written for their period instruments Saturday, although they briefly acknowledged early music in arrangements of a John Dowland pavan and Hugh Ashton’s Masque. Weirdly, they also arranged a short choral work by Bruckner for four recorders.

But a whole lot more weirdly, they put on wigs and moved like robotic sex toys in Chiel Meijering’s “Cybergirls Go Extreme.” The confrontational Dutch composer, who has said that he likes to make these women sweat, is one of their favorites. He also wrote “Sitting Ducks” for them. Paul Moravec, a New York composer, heard QNG and immediately asked to write for them. They got “Mortal Flesh” two weeks ago and went through 20 different instruments in five minutes playing it Saturday.

Kelly Garrison, the Chamber Music in Historic Sites general director, said during intermission that when he first offered some seats for a recorder quartet to SCI-Arc students, there were no takers. But a QNG sound check caught the kids’ attention, and the seats were snapped up.

Four attractive young women may be an obvious draw. Their instruments -- some modern and made from organ pipes -- are striking and also a draw. But the ensemble’s music is modern, its attitude is with-it, and its virtuosity is mind-blowing, all of which is the best youth bait of all.

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mark.swed@latimes.com