By JOEL SACHS

Salvatore Sciarrino (Photo by Mauro Fermariello)

The New Juilliard Ensemble presents its first concert at Juilliard this season on September 20 in the Juilliard Theater—but its 11th season of concerts actually opened on July 15, when the ensemble returned for its third appearance in the Lincoln Center Festival. It is a real honor to be Juilliard's only representatives in this amazing festival, in which the N.J.E. joins such illustrious performers as the Kirov Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), as well as Brazilian pop bands, Chinese theatrical groups, and dance companies from all over the world.

The New Juilliard Ensemble has a special role in the festival. Each year, one of the featured events is the performance of a contemporary opera. In order to expand the audience's acquaintance with the opera's composer, the New Juilliard Ensemble has been invited to present additional instrumental and vocal music by that person. In the process, the players have gained the opportunity to work closely with important composers. In 2001 it was the Italian master Salvatore Sciarrino; in 2002, the Chinese-born composers Bright Sheng (who lives in the U.S.) and Guo Wenjing (director of composition at the Beijing Conservatory). This year's opera was again by Salvatore Sciarrino: his version of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Although Sciarrino is not well known in the U.S., Europeans have considered him one of the leaders of the avant-garde since the late 1960s. He leaves an indelible impression: Extraordinarily engaging and genuinely friendly, he amazes his performers with the power of his imagination, the fineness of his hearing, and his ability to articulate what he wants. He came to all of the N.J.E. rehearsals except the first—which was used to "assemble" the two conducted works—and left us wondering how one could do justice to his music without his advice. For when he begins working, even the clear instructions of his score only scratch the surface of possibilities for the realization of his vision.

Since only one of the N.J.E. performers had met him (in this festival two years ago), the others were naturally somewhat apprehensive before he arrived. Within minutes, however, any hesitancy dissolved—especially since the Italian word simpatico seems to have been invented to describe him. His sound world is very quiet, and requires exceptional control of the instruments or voice. Yet even I, who know him reasonably well, was not prepared to see him spend some 10 minutes with percussionist Eric Poland to get the right quality in a single note on the bass drum; a similar amount of time with flutist Andrea Fisher, showing her how the flute could be quickly rotated to permit a virtually impossible sudden change of color and dynamics; or with Gilad Harel, working toward a virtually airless and pitchless "pop" of the clarinet reed. We soon knew that he not only knows exactly what he wants, but exactly how to get it.

New Juilliard Ensemble Juilliard Theater Saturday, Sept. 20, 8 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

All of this was especially necessary in Infinito nero (Black Infinity or Infinite Black), an unnerving monodrama for mezzo-soprano (Bo Chang) and eight players based on sayings of St. Mary Magdalene of the Mad, an early 17th-century Florentine mystic, who would walk around the convent in total silence, suddenly blurting out some words, which eight novices would desperately try to understand and write down. (Scholars believe she was probably insane and got her sainthood through family connections.) Sciarrino's music, almost all of it played between ppppp and pp, seems to pull the listener right inside her body, lodged amidst her circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems. The scoring makes it almost impossible to associate sounds with the instruments producing them; everything sounds like eerie breathing or beating. In order to enhance that effect, the piece was performed in near-darkness; only the Paul Hall exit lights, with their blood-red glow, and the music stand lights (gelled blue) produced a dim glow.

The rest of the program comprised arrangements of two madrigals and two instrumental pieces by Don Carlo Gesualdo, for the same combination of singer and players; the Piano Trio No. 2, played by D.M.A. students Martin Kennedy, Miranda Cuckson, and Jesús Castro-Balbi; and Three Brilliant Nocturnes for solo viola, played by D.M.A. graduate Stephanie Griffin. Hearing the CD of the trio before having seen the score provoked one player to comment on the performers' excellent whistling skills. In fact, the passage—like virtually every note for the strings in the entire concert—was played either in harmonics or with some fundamental alteration of the sound, such as the extreme damping effect of a practice mute.

For me, the most rewarding moment was Mr. Sciarrino's remark as we left the stage: "If only we had students like this in Italy."

Derek Bermel

One exciting feature of the September 20 concert at Juilliard launching the N.J.E.'s main season is the New York premiere of Derek Bermel's song cycle Natural Selection, which was to have taken place last season but had to be cancelled because of a singer's serious illness. The soloist for this performance will be Daniel Gross, from the Juilliard Opera Center, whom listeners may remember from his performances as the narrator in Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in last year's Focus! Festival, as Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni (last April), and as Death in Viktor Ullmann's Emperor of Atlantis (last March). The concert also includes the U.S. premiere of the shimmering and meditative Flower Ornament Music by the Danish composer Ole Buck. There is an amusing little story about this score. Mr. Buck sent it to me with a note that he had dedicated it to me in gratitude for a beautiful performance of a piece of his in the 1998 Focus! Festival. In thanking him, I pointed out what he did not notice—that it had been conducted by someone else! Other works on the program are Dance Maze by Australian Andrew Ford and the New York premiere of The Passing of Memory by David Liptak, a faculty member at the Eastman School.

Joel Sachs is the director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! Festival.