On Tuesday night, the Oberlin Wind Ensemble gave its latest performance in Warner Concert Hall. The group, under the baton of Timothy Weiss, presented a well planned program that allowed the audience insight into the different pieces.

Apart from the first piece, a fairly generic work by Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrielli played on eight trumpets, the concert could be divided into two pairs of pieces, with each piece within the pairs playing off the other.

One pairing was between Austrian composer W.A. Mozart and German composer Paul Hindemith. From Mozart, the audience heard the Divertimento No. 3 for a group of woodwinds. While the piece was a fairly typical product of the Classical era with its focus on clear-cut forms, the use of two English horns in addition to the two oboes made it somewhat unusual.

The Hindemith was his Wind Septet from 1948. A quirky piece, it clearly came out of the neo-Classical movement, making it a likely partner to the Mozart. It, too, had a preoccupation with form. This was most evident from Hindemith’s choice to make the fourth movement an exact retrograde of the second, framing the middle third movement.

The other pairing was between Toru Takemitsu of Japan and Karel Husa of Czechoslovakia. With two very different pieces from the composers, the pairing demonstrated the incredible disparity between various styles of contemporary music. The Takemitsu piece, Rain Spell, scored for flute, clarinet, harp, piano and vibraphone, was incredibly quiet and delicate. Takemitsu presented an intricate, subdued sound world, aided by his use of multiphonics (playing more than one note at once) in the wind instruments and quarter-tone tuning (notes tuned outside of the normal chromatic scale) in the harp.

On the other end of the spectrum was Husa’s monumental Music for Prague, 1968 for concert band, written in response to the Soviet invasion of the city. Much of the work was incredibly thick and dissonant, presenting almost impenetrable walls of sound where Takemitsu would have been more likely to present silence. Thus, the pairing of the two pieces gave the audience a broader understanding of the world of new music.

Of course, the concert would not have been as successful without high caliber performances to match the music. The Mozart was played with an appropriately light, elegant style, and the Hindemith with an energetic quirkiness typical of the composer’s music. The Takemitsu was given an incredible amount of sensitivity, and the Husa the forcefulness necessary to pull it off.