Rumor has it that some of the most adventurous contemporary music is being performed downtown. I myself go as far south as 22nd Street, where I enjoy the series “Second Helpings” at the Chelsea Art Museum. The format, wherein composers introduce their works in highly skilled versions performed by the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, is intelligent. The room is intimate and the crowd enthusiastic. On Saturday afternoon, the series concluded its current season with a quartet of pieces, three of which were extremely inventive.

The concert began with the world premiere of “Cuatro Bosquejos Pre-Incaicos (Four Pre-Inca Sketches)” by the Jewish-Peruvian composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Anyone who has traveled in Latin America has speculated about what indigenous music must have sounded like before European colonization. Ms. Frank relies heavily on birdsong and scales still in use in her country today. “Zampona Rota de la Nazca,” for example, riffs on the unique sound of the panpipe, while “Hombre-Pajaro de Paracas” captures that overleaf of avian harmony that is omnipresent from Houston to Santiago, Chile. The resulting pieces, for flute and cello, are evocative of the first music that stimulated man to become communicative. Footprints in the sands of time, they were excitingly delivered by Elizabeth Mann and Myron Lutzke.

The second world premiere of the day was the piano trio of Yale composer Joan Panetti, who played the keyboard part quite impressively. Titled “The Instant Gathers,” the piece evokes the apex of the Sturm und Drang school. Of special note was the deeply invested cello playing of Daire Fitzgerald, who doubles as co-artistic director of the ensemble.

It was difficult to understand why “The High and the Mighty” by Michael Daugherty was on the program. Really just a piece of treacle, it consisted of two parts. The first was an undeveloped theme that sounded like a refugee from a Lifetime flick, while the second was, in the composer’s own words, a bossa nova. Considering how many serious composers out there would kill for a slot at one of these concerts, we all deserved better.

Finally, Princeton professor Barbara White introduced her piano quintet titled “Five Elements,” loosely based on a mind and body governance system of ancient China. The St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, perhaps contrary to popular belief, is the group that spawned the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, rather than the other way around. Here the five musicians – Mayuki Fukuhara and Karl Kawahara, violins; Louise Schulman, viola; Ms. Fitzgerald, cello, and Margaret Kampmeier, piano – sounded like an entire symphonic ensemble, filling the room with bright sound. Ms. Kampmeier employed a brilliant Yamaha that emanated a powerful lightness throughout. She also “prepared” her keyboard with wooden blocks that depressed a range of notes so that their resonance was added to her note-by-note pianism.

The result was an enveloping sound universe that enchanted with its shifting rhythms and sophisticated interplay. Here was a real work of musical substance that seemed both genuine and entertaining.

At the end of the day, undoubtedly the most important aspect of this series is that it presents the works of artists who are not part of the “good old boy” network of local composers, conductors and, yes, music critics, who have a stranglehold on the choice of contemporary repertoire at the more famous halls uptown. There is so much more creativity outside of the inner circle.

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On Thursday evening there was yet another piano recital at Carnegie Hall that, during this anniversary year, began with Mozart. However, Katya Grineva had a surprise in store for her audience. The music was decidedly modal, with just a hint of the Orient. It remained exotic for its entire opening, only slowly developing into a more standard Classical sound. The piece, “Variations on a Ukrainian Theme,” was not written by our beloved Wolfgang at all, but rather by his son, Franz Xaver.

Franz did not inherit his father’s gift for melodic invention and so the work was a bit repetitive, but it was indeed well performed by this interesting recitalist. The brief curtain raiser was also the last piece of the evening, not smack dab in the center of the Romantic tradition.

Ms. Grineva did well in three excerpts – June, April, and October – from Tchaikovsky’s “Seasons,” spinning them as contemplative aural vignettes and communicating them with the lightest of touches. In fact, this delicate tactile facility would prove to be the strongest weapon in her technical armamentarium. Her rendition of the Prelude in G Major by Rachmaninoff was also notable for its liquidity and limpidity. It was, in retrospect, the best performance of the night.

However, it was all downhill from here.There is an apparent inverse ratio between the passion of this artist for the powerfully romantic and her technical prowess. Although the plucky Ms. Grineva should be praised for attempting the gigantic gesture in the Rachmaninoff C Sharp Minor Prelude, including a grandiose statement of the first three notes, she simply does not have the oomph to see it through. Lost in an ambuscade of wrong notes, the furious flurries in the right hand were just mush.

You don’t need to be Horowitz to play “Vallee d’Obermann,”but it helps. Besides the equivocal landings and arpeggios, Ms. Grineva was simply overmatched dramatically in this finger breaker. She needed a lot more lefthand power in the run up to and the execution of the climactic ending; without this sense of nature’s majesty, Liszt’s painstakingly constructed dramatic effects and thunderous crescendi are meaningless. At the break, I had to question not so much this pianist’s abilities as her choice of repertoire.

To her great credit, Ms. Grineva has resurrected Marcel Tyberg’s Sonata in B Minor, a derivative work that sounds very much like the Chopin and Liszt pieces in the same key. She championed this work and gave its world premiere in Buffalo in March. Not to be a New York snob, but Thursday’s performance was the first ever on a major stage and Ms. Grineva acquitted herself admirably. The piece is a bit longwinded and oddly reminded more of the effort of Mozart fils from the beginning of this concert than the big Romantic works that followed, repetition after repetition, circular quasi-development, and much crashing ornamentation. Tyberg – who was killed aboard a deportation train headed for the Nazi death camps – never had a chance to mature. Perhaps if he had lived, this particular piece would have been looked upon as an interesting bit of juvenilia, the child is father to the man and all that. As a stand alone, however, its promise is debatable.

Ms. Grineva might want to rethink herself at this critical point in her career.If she continues to unearth rarities and perform them this well, and jettisons the big works of virtuosity in favor of more subtle essays in quietude, she might even be invited to play a recital at Carnegie someday during the regular season.