Verge Ensemble, Pushing Sound Right to the Edge

The concert at the Corcoran Gallery of Art began with a duet for flute and electronic sound that was meant to expand the flute's acoustic space. It continued with a violin whose song was filtered through a computer into a prism of descending Doppler effects. Then there was the crash of a piano, and the leaping nervous response of a flute, and it was as if an asteroid had torn into the room and filled it with a different kind of air.

Charles Wuorinen's Duo Sonata was so unlike the two works that had preceded it, David Taddie's "Luminosity" and John Drumheller's "View From Dead Horse Point," that to link them all under the inadequate rubric of "contemporary music" seemed downright wrongheaded.

There are all kinds of schools and camps and allegiances in contemporary music. To judge from Sunday afternoon's concert at the gallery's Hammer Auditorium, the Verge Ensemble of the Contemporary Music Forum delights in disregarding party lines. It offered a colorful salad of a program that juxtaposed wildly dissimilar pieces in such a way that each one stood out.

The concert also launched a new contemporary music festival that effectively celebrates a certain species of high-church modernism. The 3genFestival is a patchwork of 10 concerts running through December. It's organized into a festival partly because the presenters realized that if there was going to be so much music by living composers played in Washington this fall, it might be a good idea to form some sort of united front. The reason for this burst of activity was the 70th birthday of Wuorinen and the centennials of Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen in December. Carter is being feted with particular energy all around the country because the composer is still here to celebrate it.

Wuorinen and Carter represent the high church: the so-called "Uptown" stance, with carefully constructed works that draw adjectives like "spiky" and "thorny," "12-tone" (in Wuorinen's case) and even, from the less cultivated, "yucky." They represent an aesthetic that used to be an inexorable party line and remains loved by many major musicians, including James Levine and Daniel Barenboim, but is now out of favor with younger composers.

Jefferson Friedman's exuberant "78," which concluded Sunday's concert, reflected today's trends. A driving, kinetic beat moved the first part of the piece irresistibly forward, yielding to a second movement of drawn-out loveliness before the clarinet (the piece was a quintet) swept it back up to its catchy conclusion. The piece didn't overstay its welcome by a minute, and it had a lot to say without overtaxing any listener who didn't want to be overtaxed.

Wuorinen, by contrast, can be an acquired taste. His Duo Sonata places tremendous demands on the players (Carole Bean, the flutist, and Audrey Andrist, the appealing full-throated pianist) as well as the audience. It is certainly expressive, weaving a web of tone rows (the building blocks of the 12-tone compositional technique) in music that bursts out, then retreats in little neurotic skitterings, always deft, always controlled and finally concluding, in its third and final movement, in an intricate dance.

In addition, Verge played Chinary Ung's "Spiral 6," a warm living trunk of sound that gave off curling tendrils and arabesques of solo violin and clarinet. "Something for everyone" has become a hackneyed phrase in programming, but this concert embraced a range of tastes and, more important, showed that they can peacefully, even fruitfully, coexist.

The next event in the 3gen Festival is on Oct. 25, when pianist Christopher Taylor plays Messiaen's "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus." For a complete program, go to http://www.cmf-verge.org/concertsandevents.html.