Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Kevin Noe directs the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble during a practice at the City Theatre on the South Side in a rehearsal earlier this month. Click photo for larger image.

Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble's success and popularity seem to be growing faster than the group can keep up. This season, they've added second performances of each concert, on Fridays as well as the Saturdays of previous years. But, on Friday at City Theatre on the South Side, as artistic director Kevin Noe was delivering his preconcert announcements from the stage, one patron bellowed good-naturedly: "When are you going to move to a bigger theater?" Noe abashedly mentioned something about "a good problem."

Noe chose to program the three short movements of David Froom's "Circling" between the larger works of the concert, thus giving a sense of theme and continuity. The sections all end with a sort of reverse resolution, moving from tonic harmonies to figures in dominant modalities, providing impetus for the next pieces. Flutist Lindsey Goodman and clarinetist Kevin Schempf, whose instrumental timbres blend exquisitely, played the miniatures from different areas of the stage, further enhancing the sense of motion.

More appropriate movement came from percussionist Ross Williams. He performed an extended jam with maracas to a projected video featuring Javier Alvarez's "Temazcal," all the while filling the stage with his own, very relevant choreography.

Managing director Jeffrey Nytch's "...and the wind spoke," a world premiere commissioned by PNME board president Bruce Wilder, was inspired by what Nytch calls "a profoundly spiritual experience I had up in the mountains of Colorado several years ago." The work did more than merely amalgamate jazz, modernist and neo-classic elements. The whole was greater even than the cube of the parts, creating a distinct, fluent compositional language.

"...and the wind spoke" opened with an extensive solo lament for alto flute that featured quarter tones and the bending of pitches. After the opening passage came a chorale-like section for piano, cello and percussion (played by Daniel Spiegel, Victoria Bass and Williams, respectively), to which the flutist (Goodman) returns on soprano flute. The gradual building of energy and triumphant release resulted in a rhapsodic piece in which the listener was not only carried along but warmly embraced by the titular wind.

This is not the first time I've said this and it probably won't be the last: bass-baritone Timothy Jones has the perfect voice for new music. It's uniform from bottom to top, with no "breaks" or passaggios, allowing him to negotiate the genre's wide, jagged melodic leaps with effortless precision. His vocal production never got in the way of the music, as he showed in his flawlessly nuanced rendition of Ross Bauer's extended vocal scena, "Oda al Olar de la Lena."

Lighting designer Andrew Ostrowski made his boldest statement of the night in Mathew Rosenblum's "Circadian Rhythms," a work ostensibly intended to depict the peaks and valleys of an average day in an average life. Ostrowski projected two large, white interlocking circles that nearly filled the upstage wall. They were either stagnant or filled with whirling shadows, corresponding to the ebb and flow of the music's energy.

Bass, Goodman, Jones, Schempf, Spiegel and Williams are legitimate virtuosi and each had many opportunities to shine. Nonetheless, the sense of precise ensemble was maintained by assistant conductor Brett Mitchell's solid (and nicely unobtrusive) direction.