This year's incarnation of the Tribeca New Music Festival, at the Flea Theater, is devoted to what the program book calls "The Emerging Avant-Pop," or music that draws its energy from both popular music and classical forms.
That description is a bigger catchall than it might at first seem: at the Sunday evening performance by the violinist Mary Rowell and the pianist Geoffrey Burleson it included Charles Ives's "Three-Page Sonata" (1905) and Vincent Persichetti's Sonata No. 12 (1982): arguably avant, in their day, and pop, after a fashion, but hardly emerging.
Still, both works are couched in complex rhythms, with attractively simple melodies sometimes swimming through them. And Mr. Burleson played them with the energy and passion of a jazz player at the densest moment of a solo. He brought a similar power, as well as an improvisatory imagination and a few minor sound effects (knocking on the piano, giving the strings a couple of strums) to Frank Zappa's "Bebop Tango."
Ms. Rowell's solo moments included a sweetly angular "Elegy" (2005) by Carol Alban and "Try to Believe," a short but wide-ranging score for violin and computer by Randall Woolf. Ms. Alban's work, originally for flute, is a memorial to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and was expanded for Ms. Rowell. The violin version has passages in double stops that, at least as Ms. Rowell played them, evoke Cajun fiddling.
Mr. Woolf's work, a movement from a set called "Bodegas," puts the violin against an electronic drumbeat and samples originally played, hip-hop style, on turntables and included in the computer track. There are few boundaries here: Minimalism morphs into a dense, electric blues solo and then into a single line that has the character of a Bach prelude.
The works that Ms. Rowell and Mr. Burleson played together were Michael Sahl's Grand Sonata and Preston Stahly's Three Pieces for Violin and Piano. They have elements in common. Both allude to a competing pair of Romantic traditions: long-lined, lyrical melodies, particularly for the violin, and overt virtuosity for both instruments. Both also reach into pop music's rhythmic arsenal, with Mr. Sahl pulling out tight syncopations for his sonata's closing Rondo, and Mr. Stahly using pointed jazz rhythms in his opening movement, and something closer to the insistent energy of rock in the last two.
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