On Saturday night, the Juilliard School began its concert season with the first of many events honoring its 100-year existence. The New Juilliard Ensemble, the group that specializes in contemporary fare, presented a selection of pieces that received their own premieres at Lincoln Center.

The event took place at the newly named Peter Jay Sharp Theater and was conducted by Joel Sachs. Relatively obscure outside the school walls, Mr. Sachs has achieved living-legend status at Juilliard, and students work very hard to pass muster for audition to his particular assemblage. The consistently high quality of performance on Saturday evening bore witness to the enthusiasm and dedication of these first-rate musicians.

I spent time in Armenia a few seasons ago and came away with the impression that the overriding emotion there is hopelessness. This pervasive depression was eloquently expressed in the first work on the program, “Island of Lamentation,” by Suren Zakarian. The work reminded me strongly of the third of the “Five Pieces for Orchestra,” Op. 10 of Anton Webern in every aspect except length.

Mr. Zakarian uses Webern’s style of klangfarben effectively, calling to mind the sleigh bells and high notes in the woodwinds to express the relentlessness of a cold, barren landscape – in the Austrian’s case the Tyrol, in the Armenian’s Mount Ararat, the sacred, snow-covered symbol of national pride now owned by the despised Turks. Mr. Zakarian develops the high-pitched image mysteriously, and the orchestra responded with sensitive and subtly shaded tone painting.

Also on the program was a standalone, mad scene titled “Ophelia Sings” by Jack Beeson, who is best remembered as the composer of “Lizzie Borden,” produced a few years ago at City Opera. Mr. Beeson’s radicalism seems to be that he has clung to the rigors of tonality: He pushes the envelope of exotic modulation, but ultimately relies on a central sense of key to set things right. Sasha Cooke was impressive as the title character, her strong mezzo supple and confident, but many of the passages led to nothing in particular. Ultimately I found the piece unable to project any sense of the wisdom of insanity.

Apparently we are supposed to be reminded of Gunther Schuller in “Stream 3,” a 1996 piece by New Zealand’s John Psathas, but I kept thinking of Potter Stewart’s statement about pornography. I may not be able to define jazz, but I know it when I hear it. And this wasn’t it. The New Juilliard Ensemble features a trio consisting of Philip Fisher (piano), Tomoya Aomori (bass), and Michael Caterisano (drums) that is meant to supply the jazz idiom while the rest of the ensemble provides the “classical,” whatever that may mean in this context. But it seems the three performers are never allowed to improvise. There is something off-putting about observing a jazz drummer reading all of his flams and paradiddles directly from a printed score.

Some bastardized form of pop was also featured in “Arachnophobia” by Kenji Bunch. This was the least interesting piece musically but perhaps the most intriguing programmatically as Mr. Sachs was able to play on the Jew’s harp from the podium and appear in the “Symphonie fantastique”-style program as a spider. Mr. Bunch was on hand for the applause of the crowd.

Valentin Bibik, a Ukrainian composer who died in Israel in 2003, wrote his “Symphony for 17 Players,” Op. 119, for the New Juilliard group. The three movements are played without interruption. It is a ruminative essay that relies heavily on the ostinato and an Eastern European sense of contrasting instrumental color. The duet for trombone and piccolo, for example, could have easily been written by Shostakovich. This quietly frenetic work was given a respectful performance, but occasionally the execution was less exact than the previous pieces had been.

Overall, this was a thoughtful and interestingly balanced concert. By the way, if it is the Sharp Theater, then do they have to tune down below A440 to compensate?