Cuisine and Radicalism Mix As Youth Has Its Evening

The six musicians who make up the impressively successful contemporary-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird are young, hip, confident and ambitious. They are also very good instrumentalists (on violin, cello, piano, clarinets, flutes and percussion). Naturally, they are drawn to music by composers who are young, hip, confident and ambitious.

But some of the works by young composers that they played at Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday night, in a concert jointly sponsored by Lincoln Center's Great Performers series and the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, were not that good. Thanks to a Naumburg commission, though, the ensemble also gave the premiere of George Perle's absorbing and beautiful ''Critical Moments 2,'' the work of a master now 86.

The program began with a sneak preview of four works from an intended full-evening suite of pieces now being written for Eighth Blackbird by a posse of young composers called the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The most surprising work was Adam Silverman's ''In Another Man's Skin,'' gurgling washes of sweet tonality, slightly out of kilter, slightly tongue in cheek. The most compelling was Dennis DeSantis's ''Powerless,'' helter-skelter riffs and runs in a compositional voice that draws from rock, 12-tone music, Copland and Messiaen in a most authentic way.

Next came Mr. Perle's work, nine brief movements that employ his distinctive 12-tone tonality (an atonal equivalent to tonal consonance and dissonance). This was music at once delicate and fidgety, by turns rigorously contrapuntal and breezily atmospheric.

After that, Aaron Jay Kernis's ''Quattro Stagioni dalla Cucina Futurismo,'' for speaker and piano trio, composed in 1991 when Mr. Kernis was 31, seemed a lame joke of a piece. The spoken text is from Filippo Marinetti's ''Futurist Cookbook'' (1932), which wryly mingles precepts of gastronomy and radicalism. The hearty narrator was Mario Batali, a chef. But Mr. Kernis's score, an intentional mishmash with parodies of everything from Beethoven to Debussy, wore thin fast, and the work took more than 20 minutes.

The concert concluded with Daniel Kellogg's ''Divinum Mysterium'' (2000), in which the sacred chant referred to in the title is variously quoted, transformed and fractured throughout the work's five movements. This is a serious effort from a young composer with an ear for shimmering colors and pungent harmony who boldly alternates pulverizing outbursts with primordial ruminations. Unfortunately, he is so in love with his own materials that he stretches them for nearly 40 minutes. Still, it was exciting, and at times endearing, to see these fine performers so involved with a work they clearly love as well.