In last week's Classical Music Agenda, I led with a concert on Sunday afternoon in the Corcoran Gallery of Art's acoustically splendid auditorium. It was the first concert of the season from the Contemporary Music Forum, but not even the Washington premiere of a major piece of new music, Paul Moravec's Tempest Fantasy, could draw more than a sparse audience.

The composer himself was on hand to give a brief presentation on Tempest Fantasy, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004. The piece for violin, clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, and piano was inspired by characters, lines, and scenes from Shakespeare's The Tempest. According to Moravec, he associated particular instruments with the three main characters: the high-flying violin with the air spirit Ariel, the bumbling bass clarinet with the earthy monster Caliban, and the melodious cello with the magician Prospero.

Moravec makes considerable demands on the players, for example, in the rip-roaring toccata-like first movement ("Ariel") with its wash of repeated notes, runs, and constant figuration in the piano. However, his basic language is surprisingly tonal, almost neo-Romantic. The four players handled the many challenges with aplomb, and it was a rare treat to hear the piece after the composer's own analysis of it.

In the first half, it was a much stranger and conceptually difficult piece that pleased me the most, Kaija Saariaho's Petals (1988), for which cellist Tobias Werner wired his instrument to an electronic device. The acoustic sound of the cello was augmented, amplified, echoed by the electronic complement. As commonly found in the "spectralist" music of this Finnish-born, Paris-based composer, there is little that can be described as melodic, but the ear is diverted by a coloristic approach to sound.

Pianist Audrey Andrist played well in opposition to a recorded track, derived from a piano but made to sound like a robotic automaton version of the instrument, in James Mobberley's Caution to the Winds (1987). The easiest piece on the ears was certainly the bluesy, toe-tapping Hop (1993), a piece by Paul Lanksy for violin (Lina Bahn) and marimba (Barry Dove). Not all modernist music has to be thorny and full of dissonance, and the Contemporary Music Forum gave its audience a pleasing cross-section of the trends of modern composition in this fine concert.

The Contemporary Music Forum will be back at the Corcoran on November 12, to give yet another Washington premiere, a piece by Roger Reynolds called Transfigured Wind IV for flute and electronics. The group will also perform Migrations for flute, clarinet, violin, ’cello, percussion and piano, a piece by Alexandra Gardner, a composer who is not only alive but also lives right here in Washington.