Modernworks was founded only two years ago, but anyone who attends new-music concerts regularly will know most of its players. Madeleine Shapiro is its director and cellist, and on Monday evening, when the group played a concert of 20th-century Italian works at Lang Recital Hall at Hunter College, the roster also included Ora Orbenstein, the soprano, Judith Pearce, the flutist, Jean Kopperud, the clarinetist, David Taylor, the trombonist, Conrad Harris and Wolfgang Tsoutsouris, violinists, Veronica Salas, violist, and Philip Bush, pianist.

In this second installment of three on modern Italians - the final one is on Monday - Luciano Berio had the first and last word. "Sequenza V" (1968), which opened the program, is a cartoonish work in which a solo trombonist is asked to produce probably very sound possible on the trombone, including chordlike, multiphonics, notes combined with singing and vocalizing, muted tones and sustained notes played while turning in a circle, with a variety of vaudeville poses thrown in for good measure. Mr. Taylor played it gamely and with an assumed virtuosity.

Mr. Berio's "Glosse" (1997), at the end of the program, spoke in an entirely different language. Scored for string quartet, the work begins abstractly, with the players strumming rhythmically but tonelessly leading to a simple cello line peering through a trilled dissonant chord. But the materials become more interesting as the work unfolds. At one point, Mr. Berio adopts the rhythmic impulse of a Baroque fast movement. A lyrical slow section follows as does a section in pizzicato chords before the serene final bars.

The variety of tone the string players brought to the Berio contrasted sharply with the eerily unpleasant timbre they produced in Salvatore Sciarrino's "Codex Purpureus" (1968-83). Much of the time the work is scored for harmonics that approximate the sound and charm of a dentist's drill, although there were fleetingly delicate passages as well. More appealing in every way was Franco Donatoni's "Late in the Day - Rondo No. 3" (1992), of which Ms. Ohrenstein gave an energetic, enthralling performance with the support of Ms. Pearce, Ms. Kopperud, and Mr. Bush. And Ms. Pearce gave a superb reading of Bruno Maderna's "Musica su due dimensione" (1952-63) for flute and tape, a work what was particularly pleasing for the multilayered interaction between the flute and the taped electronic sounds.

'STRING EXTRAVAGANZA.' David Rakowski: Mary Rowell Come Back (1997) -- Iannis Xenakis: Roscobeck (1996) -- Ge Gan-ru: String Quartet (1988) -- Charles Wuorinen: Sonata for Guitar and Piano (1995) -- Karen Tanaka: Metal Strings (1996). Performed by ModernWorks. Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse, NYC, March 16.

"Reserve seating?" we asked. Once again, we found ourselves with mixed feeling of amusement and disappointment to be given an exact location in a theater less that 20 percent full for a concert event. Throughout the evening we could have moved about just to test the acoustic balances of the Kaye, but the concert fortunately proved much too interesting to warrant that. This outstanding, brand new ensemble organized and directed by Madeleine Shapiro, one of New York's great gifts to the cause of new music, would have sounded fine from any position. Give Ms. Shapiro credit for one more artistic success story, even if a sizeable public was not on hand for this occasion.

She has done the right thing by keeping some really fine string players busy. We were not privy to ModernWorks' earlier concerts (covered in NMC by others), but we were certainly impressed by this one. The nicely balanced string quartet, made up of Wolfgang Tsoutsouris and Todd Reynolds (violins), Veronica Salas (viola) and Ms. Shapiro (cello), tore into the Ge and Tanaka pieces. Mr. Ge's String Quartet, which was substituted for the originally programmed Fu (1983), is a single-movement work with lots of this composer's penchant for sliding and portamenti on display. There are also several points wherein the players come to furious unison climaxes, a nice contrast to the polyphonic sections. But Mr. Ge shows his composing skill and good judgement after the last climax by coming to a quiet, gentle close.

The title of Ms. Tanaka's work is a bit misleading. It refers to the rock style of today from which she draws ideas. "I find an explosive energy in its music that people of today thirst for." (She has written in this style before.) Metal Strings does have the heavy beat of rock music in the viola and cello parts, while the two violins take on that adolescent whining associated with guitar and vocal roles. But make no mistake; this composition is thoroughly classical, with its shifting contours and its extended development of the chosen material outstanding.

Elsewhere, the group showed off some of its other noted members. Mary Rowell, who has been touted through some glamorously fashioned promotion as the newest fiddling sensation, performed a fun work by David Rakowski written especially for her and her electric viola. This ten-minute composition calls for certain effects, such as bent strings (which create the wha-wha sound), but they are never overdone. One movement entitled "Furnado" (after Jim Carry") really is smokin', while "Lazy" is a foot-tapping bit of the blues. But the outer movements are familiarly straight, the final portion being fast and boiling but still relatively low-key.

Contrabassist Victor Kiouliaphides joined Ms. Shapiro in the Xenakis. Here the composer has tweaked the funnybone by allowing his mathematical strictures to give way to some unorthodox microtonal episodes which the players obviously enjoyed. The piece begins in the instrument's highest registers whereupon some "playful exchanges take place in syncopated twisted chord positions and synchronous runs develop in all registers," according to the program notes.

Just before the intermission, William Anderson and Ivan Forsythe, guitarist and pianist, were featured in recent Wuorinen effort. This 11-minute sonata is a good example of the composer's "maximalist" writing, a term not to be confused with "maximal serialism." Yet, despite the clear tonal center, there are unmistakable similarities to Milton Babbitt's notions in the challenge of getting two usually incompatible instruments to make good music together. Like the older composer, Mr. Wuorinen demonstrated the idea dramatically by composing an opening in which the two instruments are rather far apart and then working them up to a purposeful balance of dynamics, rhythm and timbre.

B.L.C.

Thursday night's program the second of eight in the Sonic Boom festival of contemporary music at Columbia University, posed a not altogether unserious question: When an American compoer supported by the prestigious Rome Prize spends a year living in a villa in Rome, where the weather is idyllic, the urban life stimulating and the cuisine delicious, does this have any effect on the music said composer writes?

The answer, based on this program performed by members of the Modern Works ensemble, was: not much. But the music was engrossing for other reasons. And the three works on the first half explored how composers manage to hold the interest of listeners when they write for solo instruments other that the piano. There is a large repertory of works for solo violin, being an instrument capable, after a fashion, of producing harmony. But Elliott Carter in his "Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi: (1984), performed by Mary Rowell, keeps the music alive not through lots of notes but lots of events. It begins with an expansive solo line that ambles through high and low registers. Soon, events interrupt: flitting fast passages, burly outbursts in double-stops, fidgety rhythmic figures.

Bernard Rand's Memo Four for solo flute, from 1997, presents a harder challenge: a 12-minute work for an instrument essentially incapable of playing more than one note at a time. But he meets it. The piece begins with a long theme that alternates a jerky, rhythmic figure with poignant melodic arches. Musical events crowd in, but that captivating original theme keeps coming back in some form. In the task of sustaining interest for so long with one instrument, Mr. Rands was aided by the flutist Judith Pearce, who played brilliantly.

Lee Hyla's "We Speak Etruscan" (1992) is scored for just two instruments, bass clarinet and baritone saxophone, played here by, respectively, Tim Smith and Timothy Berne. Both instruments have sound possibilities that range from drain-pipe-low honks to delicate, slightly silly, high harmonic squeaks. Mr. Hyla's music, with its ritualistic repetitions, be-boplike riffs and propulsive energy, is arresting. The performance was stunning.

Next was Martin Bresnick's intriguing 1997 trio, cryptically called ***, for clarinet, viola, and piano (played by Jean Kopperud, Veronica Salas and Philip Bush, respectively). Short melodic figures for viola and clarinet, comprising restless couplets of notes strung together into longer lines, accumulate as the piano comments with pungent harmonies and later on, locomotive rhythmic patterns.

The concert ended with an amusing work by Aaron Jay Kernis for narrator and ensemble, "La Quattro Stagioni Dalla Cucina Futurismo," to a babblingly absurdist 1932 text by F.T. Marinetti proposing that in the future men will think, dream and act according to what they eat. Mr. Kernis wisely keeps his vibrant music, with its mock melodrama and thinly veiled quotes from Wagner and such in the background. Evan Spritzer, the amplified narrator, dominated as he was meant to.