When it comes to opening either a new play or musical or announcing new programming in the upcoming television season, curiosity and public interest can run pretty high. But if the subject is new music—of the more serious vein—just the opposite is true.

Engaging listeners in a positive experience of avant garde music requires a degree of patience and clever enthusiasm not unlike the charade of persuading your pet cat that a bath will be really good for her.

Fortunately, the young musicians of the soundON Festival of Modern Music 2010 possess charm and enthusiasm in large measure, as well as a high degree of performance acuity that makes sense of the complexities and puzzles that abound in contemporary musical scores.

Performance of Bright Days of Little Sunshine.

^{Photo bySupeena Insee Adler}

At Friday’s (June 18) La Jolla Athenaeum concert, a quartet of the soundON 2010 musical crew presented a varied sampler of recent chamber music to a modest sized but receptive audience. With the exception of Peter V. Swendsen’s “Bright Days of Little Sunlight,” which was given its West coast premiere at last season’s soundON Festival, all of the music performed was new to my ears.

Perhaps because I am a keyboard player, I was greatly impressed by Juan Campoverde Q.’s virtuoso solo piano suite “Aires,” played with finesse and confidence by Christopher Adler. The Ecuadorean composer displays a keen awareness of how to manipulate the piano’s sonic possibilities in unconventional but intriguing ways.

“Aires” opens with an insistent low B-flat over which clouds of violent, disparate arpeggios hover pregnantly. Like Olivier Messiaen, Campoverde Q. favors using the distant ends of the keyboard simultaneously, although their musical languages are quite different. Each movement of “Aries” becomes denser, filled with increasingly rich floating clusters. Although Adler’s program notes about “Aires” link it to the Baroque variation cycle, a helpful allusion, there is nothing neo-classcial or retro about Campoverde Q. His idiom is fresh and virile, a delight to the ear and imagination.

Stuart Saunders Smith’s “Willow” for solo cello, a night-music fantasia that exploits the deep, throaty tones of the instrument, sounded equally fresh and thoughtfully structured. Cellist Franklin Cox conveyed its mercurial changes and occasional lyricism with authority and sonic warmth. Cox’s own “Etude” for solo cello proved a tightly organized exercise not without pleasure for the non-cellist.

Both Anne La Berge’s 1986 “Rollin’ “ for solo flute and Ada Gentile’s 1984 duo for flute and cello, “Flashback,” brought to mind that decade’s indulgent and utterly forgettable forays into extended instrumental techniques, when every unconventional squwak and semi-discernable pitch was considered the dernier cri of inspiration. Gentile’s progression of contrasting moods, however, sounded far more cohesive than La Berge’s highly-caffeinated rant. Flutist Lisa Cella deserves kudos for mastering these complex scores.

“5 Miniaturas para Violin y Violinchelo” by the Mexican composer Ignacio Baca-Lobera emerged with Webernlike understatement, a disciplined minimalism that brilliantly distilled the single musical gesture in each terse movement. Violinist Mark Menzies added his precision and polished sonority to Cox’s artistry to make this suite memorable.

It was a pleasure to hear again Swendsen’s haunting sound collage “Bright Days of Little Sunlight,” this time with an expanded instrumentation—10 players instead of 5. In this persuasive performance I noted the lovely Swedish folk song that the cello sounds late in the piece, although it is buried under many layers of ideas and ostinatos from the other players. Adler conducted “Bright Days,” which brought the evening to a most salutary conclusion.

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