For those in need of a break from gray New York weather, the recital by Ensemble ACJW on Monday evening at the Weill Recital Hall was a cocktail with an umbrella in it. The recital moved in three different directions. There was contemporary Southeast Asian music. There was Southeast Asian music written by Westerners. And there was Western music under the influence of the South Pacific.

Michael Mizrahi and Gabriela Martinez were the pianists for Colin McPhee’s Balinese Ceremonial Music. McPhee was from Montreal, but moved to Bali in the 1930s to study and compose. Benjamin Britten, who visited Bali in the 1950s, performed Balinese Ceremonial Music as one duo-pianist with its composer.

For this performance, I had a better view of Ms. Martinez and noticed that she turned pages backward at least as often as forward in this hypnotically repetitive set of pieces. Of course, the two pianos cannot fully re-create the timbre of a gamelan orchestra, but McPhee substitutes a mesmerizing sonority as a device for shattering linear time. The pristine acoustics of Weill may not have been the ideal venue for this type of overtonal overlap, but the pianism was so strong that the music came across profoundly.

Debussy’s writing for the piano, essentially an instrument struck with mallets, leaves the listener with the feeling that there are no hammers in use, the sounds just appearing magically on the wind, and this is exactly the effect of the gamelan, which has many men pounding on instruments, and yet the sonic illusion is that there is no percussiveness. Mr. Mizrahi was impressive in “Estampes,” particularly in a colorful “La soiree dans Grenade,” but needs to rethink his interpretation of the section most relevant to this particular evening. “Pagodes” was too strong, too clear, declarative. It takes many years to develop the proper diaphanous sound to really pull off this type of chinoiserie. But Mr. Mizrahi is still a work in progress, and demonstrates unlimited potential.

Christopher Adler was in attendance to explain a bit about the style of his work “Music for a Royal Palace,” a re-creation of 19th-century Chinese music that imitated the music of Thailand. Essentially, the essay is a series of variations on a theme that never materializes. The music is fresh and challenging and was extremely well played by Meena Bhasin, viola, James Michael Dietz and John Ostrowski, percussion, and Hu Jianbing, who performed on a sheng, a Chinese mouth organ that looks like an ornate bong and sounds like the child of an unholy union between a harmonica and a bagpipe.

The ensemble members are used to moving in differing directions. They study performance practice and have the opportunity to give concerts at the most famous venue in the world but, much more important, they each spend time teaching their precious craft in the New York City school system. It is hard to imagine a more noble pursuit.

One sartorial note: Each of the women was dressed elegantly, as befitted such a prestigious concert, while the men ranged from casual to downright sloppy. Apparently they were being pulled in a different direction.