MUSIC REVIEW : New York Ensemble Takes Complex Path

It might have been the winners’ concert of a competition to see which composer could riddle a page with the most notes. The New York New Music Ensemble visited Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Monday with, as last season, an uncompromising program of complicated music, a reminder that words like “simple” and “direct” remain dirty in some advanced music circles.

Not even the program notes, written by the composers, were much help to the order-seeking witness of this slate of West Coast and world premieres, composed especially for the ensemble to celebrate its 20th season.

The ensemble, with guest conductor Jeffrey Milarsky, performed like a psyched athlete dashing through an obstacle course, meeting these intricate challenges with pinpoint accuracy and aplomb.

Arthur Jarvinen’s “Isoluminaries,” for mixed sextet, made the strongest impression, with its clear design and delimited materials. A reiterated, rolling theme increasingly fragmented episodes of melody building--the melody taking shape as the composition progressed. The notes in the episodes twisted and scattered in space, the rolling theme returning again and again as planetary landmark.

Arthur Krieger’s “Meeting Places,” for electronic tape and sextet, ravished with its dovetailing sounds, thrown rapidly at the listener and pulled back as if on a rubber band. Bursts of inertia, curt crescendos and electronic and instrumental sounds in close relationship made for a musical hall of mirrors.

Pablo Ortiz’s “Story Time” was an animated but hazy discussion for four, its participants subject to tangential thoughts. Wayne Peterson’s sextet, “Vicissitudes,” traversed dreamy voluptuousness and hyperkinetic frenzy. Ross Bauer’s “Stone Soup,” for quintet, contained furtive and nervous impulses, and edgy sostenuto--rough on the digestion.