MUSIC REVIEW : Xtet Offers a Mixed Bill at Bing

No socks were knocked off, no bells rang and genuine thrills appeared seldom at the latest Monday Evening concert. Still, hope was not denied: Fascinating recent music, bracketed by 20th-Century standards, made up the program.

The flexible-sized, contemporary-music specialist ensemble Xtet, one of the better local inventions of the 1980s, took over Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for this event, presenting scores by David Ocker, Bright Sheng and Donald R. Davis from the last decade, along with revivals of works by Stravinsky and Copland.

As conducted by Donald Crockett--a guest on the Xtet podium--Sheng’s Three Poems From the Sung Dynasty (1985) made the strongest impact. It is colorful music of bright timbres, sad intensity and many facets. Sung by soprano Daisietta Kim and played by an ensemble of 12, it produced sympathy with rich and evocative sounds and a wide variety of effects. Kim seemed to find all its dramatic urgency.

Davis’ “Bleak,” for instrumental nonet (1989), holds the listener through activity quick and slow, hyper and mellow, thick and sparse. By turns, it becomes busy, pastoral, urbane. At no point in its nine-minute length is it less than clever or engaging. Crockett conducted; these nine Xteters produced a lithe performance.

“Leap Day’s Marriage,” Ocker’s contribution from 1988, disappointed. A duet for viola and bassoon--and dedicated to the protagonists as a belated wedding-gift--it sounds like an uninspired and awkwardly written counterpoint exercise. Here, it was performed by the two members of Xtet for whom it was composed, Kazi Pitelka and John Steinmetz.

The program began with a stylish reading of Stravinsky’s “Pribautki” and ended with a scrappy, brittle run-through of Copland’s Sextet (1937).