Players' fervent efforts can't salvage tedious score

The festival, which showcased young composers in the afternoon, offered the Foss score on the heels of compositions by three FIU faculty members, and it was clearly the most well-made of the pieces (even though some of it is improvised, and at one point demands the performers to play ``mindlessly'').

Foss has the pianist dampen the instrument's innards with one hand while repeating a note pattern on keys with the other. There is a busy scherzo and some motion is stirred up, but mainly the effect is soporific. Yet Michael Linville and a group of New World Symphony musicians played the score fervently.

Jon Christopher Nelson grabbed more attention at the start of the concert with Into the Fury, inspired by Hurricane Andrew. The piece is not particularly ``beautiful.'' It actually contains quite a lot of ugly rapsing for the solo double bass. But there are some intermittently interesting tone textures.

Luís Gómez-Imbert, the Venezuelan bassist for whom this solo was created, repeatedly had to ``snap'' his instrument's thick strings. There were sharply contrasting ``buzzings'' and jagged musings between times. But I'm not quite sure what all this sound and fury added up to or, frankly, who would yearn to hear it again.

If the Foss was tedious, Orlando Jacinto García's Variations on Metallic and Wooden Shades for percussion and viola was, true to his Feldman-influenced aesthetic, as quiet, slow and sometimes lethargic as Fredrick Kaufman's Genesis for solo violin was fast and furious.

Neither work, in its totally opposite way, seemed to me to ``go'' anywhere, though Brian Jones did an excellent job of projecting García's sometimes tinkling timbres, and David Kim ran through the Kaufman showpiece with easy fluency, for its often dislocated line and awkward double-stopping and trilling.