MUSIC REVIEW : EAR Unit Explores Playful and Serene New Works

All the signs said formidable music ahead. The California EAR Unit would be playing three new works by that emperor of complication, Elliott Carter. Also slated were pieces with titles like “Realist Algorithm” and “Planting Tears.” Time to get ready for some nerve-rattling, mind-bending, ear-puzzling new music.

But by the end of this first concert of its season, the EAR Unit had a sizable (and partisan) audience at Bing Theater in the L.A. County Museum of Art giggling. The whole event Monday turned out to be rather playful and untroubling. And serene. And insubstantial.

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The highlight of this technically exacting program of premieres (local, West Coast and world, all played with impressive ease) was probably John Adams’ new “Road Movies,” for violin and piano.

A 20-minute, three-movement (fast-slow-fast), somewhat bluesy piece, it rolls along pleasantly enough through its rhythmical convolutions--tumbling waves of piano ostinato and a stuttering, double-stopped violin in perpetual ebb and flow. Yet ultimately it made little out of its own propulsiveness other than the motion itself.

The three short Carter works, “90+,” for piano; “Figment,” for cello; and “Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux II,” for clarinet, flute and marimba, each about five minutes long, sound like doodles--disciplined, active, fluttery and intricate, but doodles nevertheless.

Zhou Long’s “Dhyana,” for mixed quintet, found Buddhist calm in atonal materials delicately etched in air. Jeff Brooks’ minimalist “Planting Tears,” also for mixed quintet, seesawed along in an intellectualization of a groove. It begged the question, “Why not the groove itself?”

Drew Lesso’s “Realist Algorithm” delineated seven realist paintings by Vincent Tillman, dimly projected during the performance. Its frankly dramatic materials seemed like pure emotions in the hands of an unsubtle actor.

Laughter bubbled from the audience when flutist Dorothy Stone galloped in her chair to the picture of a cowboy, while cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick and pianist Lorna Eder provided hoof sounds.

The concert ended wittily with the straightforward 12-bar blues of “A Different Bob” (credited to the group Colorblind James Experience and Chuck Cuminale). The woman in the song, wryly delivered by James Rohrig, is never happy with the “Bob” on hand; she desires “a different Bob.” Cute.