The indestructible Contemporary Music Players have a new lease on life with a new director, a play-in at a much improved hall, and sizable programs requiring close to two dozen musicians.

Long the most venerable and biggest of the area’s modern-music specialists, the 47-year-old SFCMP unreeled a terrific season-opening concert Oct. 20 at the Taube Theater, with the main thrust being on Elliott Carter’s inventiveness.

Among the marvels of the SFCMP miracle is a focused mature audience denying the old saw that senior citizens don’t like modern music. Even though none of the music predated 1983 nor was at all familiar, the concert  drew them in and sparked discussions afterward.

At the helm was thirtysomething Eric Dudley, the new artistic director who is also a skilled (if unorthodox hand-twisting) conductor. He led Carter’s very complex “Penthode” (1985) with an ensemble of 20 players featuring various smaller groupings imbedded within.  Not just complex, it’s also very demanding, with many surges of music that must be coordinated just so, and a lot more dissonance than granddad ever put up with. (Harpist Karen Gottlieb noted that her “Penthode” score required some 370 pedal changes within its span of 22 minutes.)

Exotic instruments (contrabass clarinet, tuba, piccolo) not only expanded the sonic spectrum but also carried forward the century-long fascination with grouped timbres of the long-lived New York composer (1908-2012). Starting with Clio Tilton’s viola solo, the work then offers an ebb and flow of expanding novel sound, drawing one along inexorably.

Carter’s deft solo piece “Changes” not only showed off the artistry of guitarist David Tanenbaum but also the refined sonics of the Taube hall. They reflected the strong, crystalline response of the hall acoustics, which can be “dialed up” at will with the built-in sonic enhancement system, ranging from total clarity to highly reverberant cathedral acoustics. Clearly, a treat for the ears.

Asher Tobin Chodos, 32, contributed a 24-minute world premiere for wind quintet, “Big Show.” This had more harmonic cohesion than the other pieces, and a repeated pattern of falling scales like waterfalls tumbling to rocks below. There’s a strong sense of structure here; while four players conduct lyrical reflections, through it all the bassoon does various endearing hop-skip-jump routines in the basement bass line. I liked the work’s sense of unity and compactness; nonstop flutist Tod Brody at one point was doing a trill with the left hand while turning the page with the other.

MUSIC NOTES—The concert marked a finale for CMP’s retiring virtuoso harpist Gottlieb, who had joined the CMP in the early 1980s…. “Penthode”  was a curious name to choose. Referring to vacuum-tube technology (like diodes, triodes), it entitles an all-instrumental piece having no electronics at all…Now that the CMP is on a roll musically, it could turn its attention to web presence or staffing. Its web site has seemingly only intermittent telephone response…The restless CMP spirit migrates to six different concert sites this season…The program commemorated the passing of composer and longtime Berkeley professor Olly Wilson (1937-2018), benevolent sage and new-music exponent.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players opening 48th season Oct. 20 at the Taube Atrium Theater, Civic Center, S.F. For info: (415) 633-8802 or go online.

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