The art of evaluating new music is risky, and its track record is downright embarrassing. Few critics have had the vision of Robert Schumann, who proclaimed,"Hats off, gentlemen--a genius!" after discovering Frédéric Chopin's Opus No. 2, a set of piano variations on a duet from Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni" that was published before the young Pole had made a name for himself in Paris.

In the "Lexicon of Musical Invective," the late Nicolas Slonimsky catalogued voluminous critical attacks, in all of their pompous vitriol, that were published after the premieres of nearly every musical work that is now unquestionably accepted as standard repertory. Poor Georges Bizet, to cite just one example, met an untimely demise shortly after his opera "Carmen" failed at its opening, in great part because of the brazen hostility of the Paris newspaper critics. Today it is inconceivable that Bizet, whose memorable tunes from "Carmen" even schoolchildren know, was dismissed as someone incapable of writing a decent melody by the scribes of his day.

Fortunately, the eager young performers who collaborate to make the Art of Élan series at the San Diego Museum of Art happen make the critics’ task an easy one. They regularly choose current composers whose star has already found its place in the firmament and carefully avoid those knotty and typically self-indulgent types who lurk in academe’s ivory towers. Tuesday’s (January 12) concert offered gems by Osvaldo Golijov and Thomas Adès, two of the most sought-after contemporary composers, and one of Astor Piazzolla’s invigorating, valedictory tangos.

British composer Thomas Adès has won friends in high places, and for all the right reasons. When his colleague Simon Rattle opened his tenure as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, he programmed Gustav Mahler and Adés. His opera “The Tempest” was premiered at London’s Covent Garden in 2004 and was staged again in the 2007 season. On this side of the Atlantic, Santa Fe Opera presented “The Tempest” in 2006, and rumors have it that the Metropolitan Opera will stage it in 2012. Not bad for a composer still under the age of 40.

Adès’ “Life Story,” a precocious ten-minute monodrama for soprano, two bass clarinets and contrabass, takes the Tennessee Williams poem of the same name and ups its cynical take on a one-night stand by a factor of ten. An early (1994) work by Adès, “Life Story” reveals an opera composer ready to emerge.

Vocalist Susan Narucki surfed Adès’ treacherous, swooping lines with complete confidence. Her penetrating, incisive soprano cleanly articulated each phrase, allowing the irony to fall in big, delicious drops. San Diego Symphony principal bass Jeremy Kurtz deftly plucked his way through the jazzy underpinnings, and bass clarinetists Anthony Burr and Curt Miller alternated between deep gurgles and airy flute imitations in their highest registers.

Equally compelling was Golijov’s “Mariel,” an elegiac meditation for cello and marimba. Cellist Lars Hoefs brought a dark, honeyed vocal quality to the gently descending solo line, illuminating the intensity beneath a serene surface, and Joel Bluestone coaxed a fine, minimalist shimmer from the marimba. This was the first time I noticed the fingerprints of arch-minimalist Arvo Paert in Golijov’s writing, but it was in no way derivative.

Hoefs joined violinists Bridget Dolkas and Kate Hatmaker and violist Chi-Yuan Chen in two string quartet works, Piazzolla’s tightly-organized “Four, for Tango” and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s First String Quartet. In “Four, for Tango,” the Argentine tango master concentrates on the darker side of tango, acknowledging its roots in the slums of Buenos Aires before the turn of the last century. These players caught Piazzolla’s aggressive edge and displayed playful delight with his constant allusions in the violins to that classic shower scene in Bernard Hermann’s score to the movie “Psycho.” I thought this performance had more edge and muscle than the Kronos Quartet’s recording of the piece, released in 1988, a year after the composer published it.

The Rachmaninoff two-movement String Quartet, however, seamed something of an unwelcome trifle in an otherwise sophisticated program. Admittedly a student work by a composer whose strength was not chamber music, one hearing of this shallow, repetitive piece is more than adequate, I think.

A younger Argentine from across the border, Andrés Martín brought his “Cancion y Milongitana” to the program, playing the contrabass part, with his colleague Jorge Lopez taking the flamenco-influenced guitar role. The duo evidenced a good-humored, improvisatory dialogue as they explored contrasting moods that sampled both the traditional, somber Iberian harmonic progressions and the sprightly syncopaitons of American jazz.

For a program titled “Shades of Affection,” the shades were definitely drawn and not all the romantic endings happy. But musically, it was bliss.

PRESS HERE for PROGRAM and BIOS