“The present day composer refuses to die,” was the dictum from Edgard Varèse that was printed on every Frank Zappa album. Not only does the living composer refuse to die but the past week demonstrated that in Southern California he thrives.

It certainly helps to have musicians like Mark Robson in their corner.

“An amalgam of nostalgia, melancholy and a flight into the interstices of light and dark” were how the program notes described the Busoni sonatina from 1917 that Robson played at his Jan. 10 Piano Spheres recital at the REDCAT – words which very well could have threaded his eclectic and intelligently wrought program.

In the impotent Beethovenian gestures of Wolfgang Rihm’s “Tombeau,” the transfigured romanticism that colored not only the selection of Philip Glass etudes but were also faintly audible in the selections from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Natürliche Dauern,” the slippery and uneasy melodic gait of Daniel Rothman’s “Life Between Tidemarks and Rocky Shores,” the shocking bursts of primary colors among pastels that was William Kraft’s “Translucences” Robson presented a musical portrait of modernity coming to grips with the new liquid modernity, with the unexpected finiteness of itself. The ever-fading past is grasped at for comfort, for stability. But the gesture is futile as the morose, twilit classicism of Busoni’s “Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII” intimated – the bell-like motif that closed the work a reminder that sometimes all we can do is regret for the past and hope for the future.

It was a bittersweet message for the new year, one that Robson softened by imparting it with his usual subtly shaded dynamics, richly colored texturing, and bronzen tone.

Father and son composers Artashes and Ashot Kartalyan, who headed the Dilijan Chamber series program on Jan. 15, inhabited an altogether different world: robust, sunny, and redolent of the aroma of Armenian folk music.

Ashot’s brawny, even somewhat astringent idiom, was criss-crossed by veins of raw melodicism: facets best exemplified by his “Song Cycle on Texts by Indra,” which opened the program.

The challenging, melismatic soprano line was woven into a solo violin role (dispatched stylishly by Tony Arnold and Movses Pogossian respectively) that was part counterpoint, part commentary on what was being sung, making for a score defined by its restrained and elegiac beauty.

The same composer’s “Suite for Soprano Saxophone and Percussion” was less successful, though performers Katisse Buckingham and Kuniko Katō played it to the hilt.

His father, Artashes, was represented by his “Three Songs for soprano, violin, and percussion.” These were breezy, light miniatures that sounded like Carl Orff’s “Schulwerk” made a stopover in Yerevan. Charming music, even if the last jazzy song’s cheese induced a bit of cringe.

It was followed by a performance of Mendelssohn’s stormy “Piano Trio No. 2 in G minor,” played by violinist Varty Manouelian, cellist Edvard Pogossian, and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert. They delineated the sense of crisis and danger in this score without ever sacrificing poise. A very Mendelssohnian performance.

It was fitting that the poise and bittersweetness of concerts from earlier in the week should have come together at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s celebration of composer Terry Reich’s 80th birthday, a program bookended by his “Mallet Quartet” and exuberant “Tehillim.”

Its beating heart was the West Coast premiere of “Pulse,” which was co-commissioned by the orchestra.

A work for a small ensemble of winds, piano, electric bass, violins and violas, “Pulse” was a spare and unexpectedly lyrical score that, at times, tempted one to think of as a “late work:” the retrospective gaze of an artist aware of the impermanence of one’s life, struggling to contextualize his work and its place in history. The “Pulse,” then, was not only the regular beat that animated this work to its very close, but also, perhaps, referred to the human heart, sometimes fallible and always destined to stop.

Yet such thoughts were quickly dispelled by the sight of the spry and youthful looking composer himself who took to the Disney Hall stage along with conductor Jeffrey Milarsky to receive the audience’s enthusiastic applause.

“The present day composer refuses to die …”