It's a symptom of our culture's resistance to change that many of the staples of what's commonly called "new music" are anything but new. John Cage (1912-92), Morton Feldman (1926-87), and Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), for instance, still have the power to shock and surprise us with their radical visions, even if they themselves are gone from the scene. And it sometimes seems that the magnitude of their contributions to musical history is so great that it's hard to focus on the living artists who have inherited their collective mantle-especially when those artists are young, generally unrecorded, and rarely heard in these parts.

If Helikon Ensemble director Leslie Dala is right, however, obscurity is not the fate that's in store for Toronto-based composer Brian Current. Dala's band will perform two of the 32-year-old musician's works at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Sunday (March 13), in recognition of what its leader believes is a major talent.

"The first one is a piece that's recent-I believe it's from last year-called The Star Spangled Banner (in slanted time), which exists in two versions," Dala explains, reached at his Vancouver home. "There's an orchestral version, and then he made a trio arrangement of it as well, for violin, cello, and piano, which is the one we'll present. The other piece of his is a much earlier work, from 1996, which was commissioned by the Continuum ensemble of Toronto. That piece is simply called Quintet. But its subtitle is Circus Songs, and it contains some very high-energy, almost frantic writing for the five instruments using a lot of unusual techniques and extreme registral effects. It's a very virtuoso-type piece."

Dala declines to comment on whether Current's take on the U.S. national anthem has any subversive intent. But musically it's certainly unusual, relying on a technique Current first deployed in his chamber opera Airline Icarus, a work in progress the seven-member Helikon Ensemble is developing in conjunction with Opera Breve.

"In the opera, there's this notion of taking off, so what Brian does is build in these sequences of acceleration which would last about four bars, and you'd get from one tempo to another that way," Dala explains. "So you were constantly speeding up, but that was all written into the music."

Current isn't the only relatively youthful composer whose works Helikon will play on Sunday: the Little Chamber Music Series That Could-sponsored concert itself is titled Generation X, and it also features pieces from UBC music professor Dorothy Chang, Victoria-based Tobin Stokes, and Chicago's Stacey Garrop. All are in their 30s, and all, Dala predicts, are destined to become audience favourites.

"What they have in common," he says, "is mostly the fact that they're all quite exceptional, and that they've received so much recognition already at such a young age."

Any other generational characteristics will have to be deduced from the concert itself-and given the skill of the Helikon players, that's far more likely to be a pleasure than a chore.