At first blush, listeners might have thought Randy Woolf's "Everything Is Green" to be a nod to the lime "team" colors of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Turns out, the composition may be a standard bearer of its own, for an intriguing niche of the art song genre. This achingly exquisite work for flute, piano and tape highlighted another outstanding concert by PNME Friday at City Theatre.

To consider "Everything Is Green" as song is a bit of a stretch. For one, there was no singer. A pre-recorded narrator, Rinde Eckert, related a short story by David Foster Wallace over the playing of flutist Lindsey Goodman and pianist Daniel Spiegel. But it felt like song and engaged with the same power. The story, set in a trailer park, is elegiac. A world-weary middle-aged man confronts his cheating girlfriend. Rather than yelling at her, he desperately tries to explain to this younger and less complex companion what his deeper, spiritual needs are these days.

Woolf captured the blend of hopelessness and passion the protagonist feels. The piano assumed the role of the singer with a pensive melody while the flute portrayed the man's ranging emotions. A sampled pedal steel guitar lent the strains of country music. The girlfriend is embodied by an intrusively synthetic, Laurie Anderson-like sample. This punctuates her lack of depth. But, in a score roughly in G major, her line slips into E minor at the end, showing that she, too, felt depression. The crux of the work finds the man deciding to ignore her shortcomings and stay, a choice echoed with the flute emphatically playing a high G. Goodman performed the difficult part with agility and emotion.

PNME also impressed with a growing mastery of a theatrical approach. In Dan Welcher's mystic "Phaedrus" for clarinet, violin and piano, the first movement found the trio spread out across the stage, a daunting prospect for clarinetist Kevin Schempf and violinist Marc Levine, who cycled through several canons with each other. The physical distance enhanced the music, titled "Apollo's Lyre (Invocation and Hymn)." When the three re-convened close to each other for the second movement, "Dionysus' Dream-Orgy," it added intensity to the fiery passagework.

Composer Roger Dannenberg is on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. "Feedback" called on violinist Levine to improvise while a computer added predetermined audio effects. Like meta-notation, these effects changed with time, meaning that if Levine played something that worked at one moment, it might elicit cacophony at another. There were a few such moments, but the bulk of the piece transpired well. Combined with computer-generated video, "Feedback" was an intriguing if emotionally detached sound sculpture.

Cambodian-born Chinary Ung studied in the states with George Crumb. So you know his music is not the typical East-West mix. "Oracle," for full ensemble, was a virtuosic piece that called for humming and shouting amid impassioned strains and countless tintinnabulations. Under Kevin Noe's direction, it shimmered and flowed, somehow avoiding a prophesy of succumbing to its exceeding difficulty.