Eightblackbird played a recital at USC this past Friday
(photo by 21C Media Group)

Contemporary classical music doesn't have to be forbidding.  Sure, it's not the kind of music that translates comfortably to your iPod earbuds. But fortunately, there are some outstanding performers who, when experienced live, invite you into some of the craggiest compositions. The instrumental sextet eighth blackbird and pianist Gloria Cheng are two of today's leading examples.
 
Both have recently won Grammy Awards and, as luck would have it, both performed recitals last week in L.A.  Eighth Blackbird was at USC as part of a short residency at the Thornton School, culminating in Friday evening's performance at Newman Recital Hall.  A USC alumna herself, Gloria Cheng played the first of this season's PianoSpheres concerts Tuesday night at downtown's Zipper Hall.

The name 'eighth blackbird' derives from one of the stanzas by New England modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Thirteen years after its founding, five of the six original members of the Chicago-based ensemble are still at it, maintaining a hip, fresh profile.  (If you don't believe me, go to their website, which included this recent Tweet: "Flavor of the month: classical music iPhone apps. The only problem? They aren't interesting or fun.")  Fun or musical play is exactly the mood that eighth blackbird aspires to - even if the composer is named Pierre Boulez or if the instrumentation rarely extends beyond a simple flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion.
 
For the first half of Friday's concert, eighth blackbird most memorably served up 'Spam,' a propulsive post-Minimalist piece by Marc Mellits that revels in caffeinated compound meters before settling into a surprisingly subdued coda.  Additionally, the tangy sonorities and vaguely Latin rhythms of Missy Mazzoli's "Still Life with Avalanche" impressed.  Donald Crockett's evocatively titled "Whistling in the Dark" and Boulez's "Derive I" were also on the musical menu.  
 
But I better enjoyed the second half - as much for the musical selections as for eighth blackbird's signature stagecraft.   Playing the music memorized and therefore free to roam around the hall, the performers finessed the carefully constructed miniatures of George Perle's "Critical Moments 2."  In Thomas Ades' delightful "Catch," clarinetist Michael Maccaferri seized the spotlight with jokey material that had him moving all over amid the work's musical gamesmanship.  Still, it was all prelude to Stephen Hartke's recently commissioned "Meanwhile."  Employing exotic Asiatic sounds such as the plexatone gamelan and water gong, "Meanwhile" surveyed a gamut of timbres and textures through its six movements, accompanied by some elaborate choreography from eighth blackbird.
 
A professor at the Thornton School since 1987, Hartke is not the least bit academic in his music.  Friday evening was a valuable reminder of how some of today's best music is being composed in our own backyard.
 
Likewise, Tuesday's piano recital by Gloria Cheng served to showcase L.A.'s own amazing interpreter of new works.  "In case you're lost, Murray Perahia is playing across the street," Cheng said coyly in opening remarks at Tuesday's concert, which took place right across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall where the veteran Perahia was performing at the same time a program of Schumann, Bach and Beethoven.  She needn't be so modest. No less than composers Thomas Ades and John Harbison were in the audience to hear their own works.  That's the kind of weight that Cheng commands from the contemporary music community.
 
The concert was impeccably programmed.  Shostakovich and Schnittke were clever bookends to a recital that includes two world premieres (works by Harbison and Andrew Waggoner) and Luigi Nono's challenging piece for piano and tape,"... sofferte onde serene."  Of the evening's offerings, Harbison's "Leonard Stein Anagrams" was the clear solo standout - charming and exquisitely crafted character pieces memorializing Stein, the former USC professor and Arnold Schoenberg protege.  For sheer emotional impact, look no further than Schnittke's Piano Quintet which, when played with the brilliant Calder Quartet Tuesday night, tore your heart out.
 
I've always maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Russian composer's music, but not this time.  In this '70s-era chamber work, the influence of Shostakovich - Schnittke's older contemporary - is clearly felt.  The somber middle movements evoke the strains of desperation and melancholy frequently heard in Russian music.  But this time there was a clear silver lining to the emotional pain - in the final "pastorale" movement, a gorgeous repeated piano melody, which seemed a riff on the hymn of thanksgiving from Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.
 
Contemporary music is often viewed from the lens of continuous novelty, yet it's the old that still captivates some of today's most innovative composers,whether it's Ades' ghostly deconstruction of a Dowland lute song (beautifully captured by Cheng, playing mostly from the extremes of the keyboard, in "Darknesse Visible") or Waggoner's fantasy based on the familiar "La Folia" tune.  In the end, the musical selections - and Cheng's poetry - conjured the famous final words from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."