By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • November 23, 2014

It would be tough to get more up-to-the-minute than the concert of contemporary Chinese music at the Freer Gallery of Art on Saturday, where four of the six works on the program were written just this year. And it would be equally hard to find such a range of richly imaginative new work — steeped in tradition yet thoroughly 21st-century — that transcends nationalism but retains, at its heart, a compelling and distinctive Chinese sensibility.

Zhou LongThat description might also apply to the venerable New York-based ensemble Music From China, which designed a program to dovetail with the new Freer exhibit “The Traveler’s Eye.” Combining such traditional instruments as the erhu (a two-string fiddle), pipa (lute) and dizi (bamboo flute) with cello and Western percussion, the group opened with the 18th-century reverie “A Moonlit River in Spring,” then embarked on more modern journeys in Chen Yi’s lively, folk-song-based “Three Dances From China South” (2014), Eric Moe’s “A Panoramic Guide to Glacier Travel” (a dense new work that unfolds with the stately gravity of glaciers) and the poignant, plaintive and moving “Leaving Home” (2014), by the ensemble’s erhu virtuoso, Wang Guowei.

But the standouts may have been two striking and very exciting works by Zhou Long and Huang Ruo. Long’s “Mount a Long Wind” is a vivid, edge-of-the-seat tone-poem from 2004 depicting the voyage of a Chinese dragon boat through a gathering storm. Ruo’s “The Murmuring Path” wasn’t as overtly specific — the composer describes it as “a personal journey” — but was just as perfectly drawn: an expressive and fiercely inventive new work, exploding with off-kilter rhythms, otherworldly colors and wild, galloping imagination.