CLASSICAL MUSIC

Great Noise Ensemble

How can you not love a music group so cheerfully unstuffy that it calls itself Great Noise Ensemble? Composer/conductor Armando Bayolo put the band together a few years ago from young musicians gathered via Craigslist, and since then has been waging a crusade to "fight for the performance of new American music" in the D.C. area.

And to judge by Sunday's well-attended performance at the National Gallery of Art, the fight is going pretty well. The evening opened with Barbara White's "Learning to See," six spare and precisely calibrated miniatures inspired by artists. Often lovely and atmospheric, they were almost too ephemeral to make an impact and received a tepid audience response. But Evan Chambers's melancholy "Rothko-Tobey Continuum" for violin and tape was a dark, gripping gem, played with an elegant sense of restrained yearning by Heather Figi.

Blair Goins's "Quintet" abounded in lighthearted melodies and would have felt at home in the Paris of 50 years ago, though the odd instrumentation -- a tangled collision between a wind quintet and a string quintet -- led to some mushy sonorities and undercut its charm.

More successful (and substantial) was Bayolo's own "Chamber Symphony." Full of lush ideas and a kind of fierce grandeur, it unfolded with subtle, driving power -- a work worth hearing again.

But the high point of the evening was the world premiere of Andrew Rudin's Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra. Rudin has a gift for the kind of gesture that grabs you by the ears and won't let go, the music building in power as its inherent possibilities unfold. Extroverted, engaging and driven by an almost heroic sense of drama, it received a bravura performance from pianist Marcantonio Barone.

-- Stephen Brookes

Kennedy Center Chamber Players

The Kennedy Center Chamber Players, joined by pianist Lambert Orkis, performed at the Terrace Theater on Sunday, framing the world premiere of Stephen Jaffe's Sonata in Four Parts with an early Beethoven piano trio as an opener and Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet as the finale. Sunday's Players (violinist Nurit Bar-Josef, violist Daniel Foster and cellist David Hardy) are principals of the National Symphony Orchestra.

In his Trio in C Minor, Op. 1, No. 3, Beethoven fully reveals his idiosyncratic self in music powered by turbulence in an emotional maelstrom of ideas -- none of them lost on the musicians. Overall, the performance displayed the music's symphonic breadth amid some quirky asides, with a breathtaking variation movement in which the theme is telescopically reduced to nothing.

Hardy and Orkis followed with Jaffe's sonata. Moored, though not slavishly, to traditional tonality, the piece also touches on fleeting jazz idioms, impressionist language and seemingly random gestures of chance music. Yet the result is by no means an eclectic, gimmicky amalgam, but rather a comprehensible whole rendering the tried-and-true in new guises. Jaffe said Sunday that he seeks to incorporate "musical styles from the past as an impetus to broaden my own language."

The musicians made the most of Schumann's Piano Quartet with all its devastating beauty voiced in magical sumptuousness -- especially in the solo moments -- and with intimate coherence. The finale was overwhelming in its ultra-expressive fugal elegance.

-- Cecelia Porter