The first piece, "About Scales" (1979) by Rudolf Komorous was a solo vibraphone line that alternated with dense held chords. This later translated into slow seesaw lines played by a cup-muted trombone, flute, and piano. Their sonorities often evoked the voicings of Gil Evans with their tonally ambiguous major-minor sounds. All in all, it was human, spare, and essential music.

Martin Smolka's "O My Admired C Minor" (2002) repeated episodes of piercing strings and a screechy clarinet that kept showing up in the audience's face. When a single note passed from cello to percussion to piano, and we identified with the resultant drawn-out sustenuto, everything, it seems, melted into the waiting chords. The music then stopped; and the flute's final 2-note figure returned everything to silence. This piece had the pungency of a tightly-written essay.

But the standout composition this evening was Cassandra Miller's "Goose Food" (2008) as it proved to be the most programmatic and dissimilar composition of them all.

It paired Robert Bringhurst's recorded reading of Haida myths with flocks of high peepings from the piccolo/clarinet/strings, and it didn't always work.

Amidst tempestuous swells and the marking time of the tympani and tubular chimes, Huhtanen sang bravely and defiantly against the overwhelming forces of fate and impending doom. The way she fought back against certain death with the life force of her songs was close to heroic.