New Sounds From a Smaller Stage

The New York Philharmonic must be gratified that a sizable and enthusiastic audience showed up at Symphony Space on Thursday night for the inaugural concert of Contact!, a contemporary-music series. This venture is the brainchild of Alan Gilbert, the orchestra’s new music director. Some risk was involved, and not just the obvious worry of whether people would come to a series of contemporary-music concertsThat fear, at least, has been put to rest by the response to this program, which presented premieres of four works for chamber orchestra, conducted by Magnus Lindberg, the Philharmonic’s composer in residence. Listeners of all ages, including lots of eager-looking young people, filled the hall. Audience members chatted animatedly during intermission, swapping reactions to the first two pieces.

But there was another potential risk. The Philharmonic does not want to be viewed as segregating new music in a sub-series of off-site programs for chamber orchestra.

Happily, nothing of that sort came through. In his first season, Mr. Gilbert is imaginatively integrating new and recent works into the orchestra’s subscription-season programs. So the Contact! series has the potential to be a dynamic addition to the Philharmonic’s offerings beyond the confines of Avery Fisher Hall, which was the whole idea. (Mr. Gilbert will conduct the second Contact! program in April.)

Thursday’s program began with “Game of Attrition” for chamber orchestra by Arlene Sierra, an American now living in London. Before the performance she spoke about the piece with Mr. Lindberg. (Conversations with composers are to be a regular part of Contact!) Ms. Sierra has long been fascinated by game theory and Darwinian evolution, and this piece is an attempt to evoke the process of attrition, as in natural selection.

Throughout the bustling 14-minute work, instruments engage and tussle with one another as if struggling to prevail and move up the musical/evolutionary ladder. Yet, as the title suggests, Ms. Sierra makes a game of it. Little cells of tightly confined pitches knock about with others, grow into larger gestures and then cut loose into skittish flights.

Next came “Verge” for 18 strings by the Chinese-born Lei Liang, who has lived in the United States for 20 years. Mr. Liang began composing the piece a month before his first child was born and completed it the month after. The work uses pitch equivalents for the letters of his son’s name (Albert Shin Liang) as the basis for themes and chords.

The opening, an atmospheric haze of sounds laced with soft bow scrapes and cosmic high harmonics, seems not very pitch-oriented. Soon, however, melodic fragments and thick, piercing chords emerge, along with a plaintive theme meant to evoke Mongolian chant.

At one point the music breaks into a grimly urgent episode, as the instruments dispatch perpetual-motion riffs. “Verge” ends in spiritual calm, though the sustained chords are still pierced with ethereal scratching sounds.

During his conversation with the noted French composer Marc-André Dalbavie, Mr. Lindberg’s limitations as an interviewer became evident. He asked if Mr. Dalbavie was still as fanatical about spectral music as when they first met in 1985. But he never defined the term — which refers to allowing computer analysis of the aural and spatial qualities of sound to affect the process of composition — and used too much insider lingo. When Mr. Dalbavie said he employed an actual Gregorian chant as a thematic thread in his piece, titled “Melodia,” Mr. Lindberg might have had an orchestra member play the chant for the audience.

Still, the music was mesmerizing. Mr. Dalbavie has an acute ear for lush colorings and pungent, post-tonal harmonies. This pensive work evolves in fragments and gestures, with strands of chantlike melody interspersed with sustained sonorities and tremulous colorings. In one unexpected, exhilarating outburst, the instruments break into a kind of free-for-all toccata.

Arthur Kampela, a Brazilian-born New Yorker and a gregarious talker, was a hit with the audience as he explained that his piece, “Macunaíma,” was inspired by a 1928 novel that follows the exploits of a fantastic young man, loosely based on Amazonian folklore. The character, born black with the capacity to turn white, winds up a mystical entity, a “constellation of pleasure,” as Mr. Kampela put it.

The piece came across as a restless, wildly colorful but rather messy romp. Imagine a makeshift work by a Brazilian Ives. At the start, half a dozen players with colorful hand drums walked slowly up the aisles in the hall and joined the ensemble onstage. Soon everyone broke into a rowdy din of frenetic rhythms and every-which-way riffs. At one point some players went behind a curtain, where you heard them playing bits of marching-band music and laughing.

There may be a real piece in “Macunaíma” somewhere. I would like to hear it again. It was certainly fun for the players, who were good sports, and for the audience, which whooped during the ovation.