The Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble under director Kevin Noe has been an experimenting ensemble as much as a group that plays experimental music.

PNME doesn't perform music on the far reaches of taste; it plays music -- sometimes even "old" music -- in new and engaging ways.

Pinched by a reduction in funding due to the economy, the group was forced to cut a week of performance and a week of rehearsal, meaning Noe had to curtail his plans for a big production piece this summer. But what he created on stage last night at City Theatre for its season-opening concert was still far more slick and compelling a format than you will see in symphony concerts for years. Interactive lighting, seamless movement from piece to piece, surround-sound audio and video projections and humor. And if the concert lacked theatrics, that only put the focus on the drama of the works and the virtuosity of the players.

The first half was lively, opening with Robert Paterson's Sextet. Beware the generic name, this piece for violin (Natalie Shaw), cello (Norbert Lewandowski), flute (Lindsey Goodman), clarinet (Campbell MacDonald), piano (Keith Kirchoff) and percussion (David Skidmore), was a brilliant riff on TV real crime shows. Seeing "Cops" and other shows as packaging real emotion for comfortable consumption, Paterson instead infused the work with a nervous energy -- the real sweat on the brow of a perp who knows the jig is up. From strident whistles to a siren imitated in a violin glissando to anxious rhythms, this piece definitely got its man.

David Bithell's "Table Setting" could have starred at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference at Carnegie Mellon University last month. Noe and Skidmore sat across from each other with a miked tabletop of different surfaces upon which they rhythmically built instruments out of blocks and small pitched percussion. But the joy of the piece came in the deadpan comedy of Noe and Skidmore as they competed against each other to build the better instrument.

Roger Dannenberg, the CMU professor who was a host for that NIME conference, used a conventional interface -- the cello -- to create a more expansive piece in his "Critical Point." As Lewandoski played a rich tone here or charged rhythms there, Dannenberg cued a computer to process the sound in myriad ways, all with a animated video projection (by computer scientist Tomas Laurenzo) that danced with the music. The rhapsodic piece dazzled but also had a soulfulness to it, introspective in the quieter sections.

Less successful using processing was Alejandro Vinao's Triple Concerto. The novel concept of the synthesized music from the speakers as tutti and the pianist, flutist and cello as solo group in this piece from 1984 wore off fast with aimless, repetitive music.

Pierre Jalbert's "L'oeil Ecoute (the Eye Listens)" was hurt somewhat by following the Vinao concerto. But the world premiere of this PNME commissioned work (with a grant from Chamber Music America), that accompanied a film by Jean Detheux unveiled a work of subtle sophistication. The three-movement work began with bubbly strains that matched the shifting patterns of the abstract film and then moved to more monochromatic timbre as the video darkened. Clearly a promising work that cannot be assimilated on one listening.

Afterwords, PNME celebrated the release of its newest CD, "Against the Emptiness."

The program repeats at 8 tonight.