Concert review: Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented one of the most engaging programs Thursday night in its invaluable series of concerts at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

It was not filled with the kind of chestnuts that organizations cling to in the mistaken belief that only familiar repertory repeated year after year is the way to attract and hold audiences.

“Drumming,” by contrast, offered seven contemporary and modern works for percussion in a sequence that had greater variety and excitement than the majority of present-day concerts by full symphony orchestras.

It helped, of course, that more than half of the pieces were between three and nine minutes in length. Long ago contemporary groups such as the Kronos Quartet found that serving musical morsels not only whetted the appetite but kept younger, easily distracted diners coming back.

But even more important on Thursday was the relationship between pieces, a relationship that stimulated by varying performing forces, textures, rhythms and dynamics so that the sound of struck-and-stroked instruments never became predictable.

There was purity (Part 1 of Steve Reich’s “Drumming”), exoticism (Toru Takemitsu’s “Rain Tree”), impressionism (Ian David Rosenbaum’s marimba transcription of John Cage’s “In a Landscape”), modernist challenge (Bela Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion) and choreographed playfulness (Thierry de Mey’s “Musique de tables”).

How one followed upon another was as crucial to success as the skill of percussionists Victor Caccese, Christopher Froh, Ayano Kataoka and Rosenbaum who all played with unfailing virtuosity whatever the music — loud or soft, driving or tender, fast or slow, simple or complex.

De Mey’s eight-minute selection was the most immediately attractive, as three performers sat side by side at a table at the front of the stage facing the audience and played, well, the table itself. Gestures were stylized and, at times, intended to provoke laughter, which they did. The diversity of sound, particularly quiet sound, was wholly surprising.

That the toughest work was the oldest, Bartok’s 1937 Sonata, also doubtless surprised some. At the head of the score is a drawing to indicate the disposition of instruments. Unusually, Thursday’s grouping followed the plan exactly, with percussion between and behind pianos that fanned out from each other and had Wu Han and Gilbert Kalish playing with their backs to the audience.

Lids of the pianos were removed, which, unfortunately, freed their tone to rise and become soft-edged whereas the percussion shot directly at listeners across the pianos, remaining crisp. This created an imbalance that diminished Han and Kalish’s achievement, making it sound recessive even when attacks were most fierce.

The program also included potent diminutive works by Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic and Conlon Nancarrow.

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