By Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle 

The secret truth underlying the success of Eighth Blackbird, the terrific young sextet that played in Herbst Theatre on Friday night, is exhilaratingly simple: New music is fun. It's exciting, provocative, stimulating and refreshing -- all the things that we typically associate with the new, but too rarely with contemporary music.

Appearing under the aegis of San Francisco Performances, this wise and vivacious ensemble ran through a variety of recent music, by seasoned masters and relative beginners. Not all of it was equally rewarding, but it all benefited from the group's theatricality, technical flair and spirit of adventure.

The members of Eighth Blackbird -- the group comprises flutist Molly Alicia Barth, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew L. Duvall and pianist Lisa Kaplan -- trained together at Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Cincinnati, and it's obvious that a shared sense of commitment inspires their endeavors.

These are not musicians who tackle new music out of some sense of duty. Their deftly choreographed performances sparkle with ingenuity and enthusiasm, and even if some of their moves don't quite pay off (the contrapuntal spoken intros, most notably, are pretty silly), it's still a pleasure to hear recent music done without the usual air of dour professionalism.

For sheer comic zest, it's hard to beat Aaron Jay Kernis' "Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine," which seems to be showing up more and more often on concert programs (the Peabody Trio did it memorably three years ago).

While a piano trio plays parodic rhapsodies and theatrical oratory -- and occasionally imitates dogs and cats or sings "O Sole Mio" -- a speaker (Maccaferri) intones excerpts from Filippo Marinetti's deliriously insane 1932 cookbook, whose typical dishes include a plate of raw meat that has been electrified, marinated for 24 hours and then served on a bed of peppers and snow. The piece is both hilarious and somehow chilling, and the performance was first-rate.

After intermission came Frederic Rzewski's "Pocket Symphony," a wonderful new creation written for the group. The title is entirely apt -- Rzewski's 30- minute, six-movement opus, bears the same relation to a full-scale orchestral symphony that a piece for toy piano, say, does to a Beethoven sonata. The genre is essentially the same; only the scale and tone differ.

Each movement focuses on a different instrument (the fifth movement is an extended piano solo, vigorous and haunting), with an improvised cadenza that gives some parts of the piece a concerto-like feel. But the way Rzewski sets up and then carefully works out his thematic materials -- in some cases richly melodic, in others spare and evocative -- owes everything to the symphonic tradition.

The group opened the program with the "Minimum Security Trailer," a coming- attractions package of excerpts from four forthcoming commissions by the members of a Yale-based group called the Minimum Security Composers Collective.

I couldn't catch the order of the pieces (those goofy spoken intros again), but the composers include Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno, and their work ranged from a dense, exciting group toccata (the second of the four offerings) to a simpery, cloying fantasia on Lennon and McCartney's "Blackbird."

That tribute gesture was better handled in the eight movement of composer Thomas Albert's "13 Ways," whose taut, lovely fourth movement served as an encore.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.