Prism Quartet and Music From China at Weill Recital Hall Matthew Dine for The New York Times Prism Quartet and Music From China performed together at Weill Recital Hall. Anyone unfamiliar with the Prism Quartet, a Philadelphia saxophone ensemble, and Music From China, a New York group formed to preserve and promote traditional Chinese music, might assume that they had precious little in common. But these industrious ensembles, both founded in 1984, share a mission to expand their repertories and an insatiable hunger for new music. Considering the proliferation of Chinese-born composers in Western concert music, perhaps it was inevitable that their paths would cross. Prism and Music From China toured together in 2009 and documented their shared repertory with "Antiphony," a noteworthy album on the Innova label. On Friday evening they reunited at Weill Recital Hall to present new pieces by Lei Liang, Fang Man, Huang Ruo and Bright Sheng, who were all present to introduce their works. Mr. Lei's "Messages of White," he said, evokes sensations he associated with snow - solitude, silence and playfulness - through a descending chromatic scale revealed, concealed and altered in various ways. From an opening of crystalline stillness expressed in brittle scrapes, skitters and pops, pealing crotales (antique cymbals) and copious silence, Mr. Lei offered painterly evocations of motion and mood. An eerie tranquillity dominated by Hu Jianbing on sheng (a mouth organ) ceded to buoyant rhythms that airily flitted across vibraphone and pipa (a lute), saxophones and yangqin (a hammered dulcimer), before the work concluded in chilly repose. Ms. Fang said her "Dream of a Hundred Flowers" was inspired by an elaborate dream that involved a Beijing opera melody: whether remembered or imagined she could not say. An expert molder of near-chaotic energies, she assigned her melody to the erhu (a two-stringed fiddle), played expressively by Wang Guowei. His song was swiftly engulfed in vivid whorls of colorful turbulence and dreamy illogic; at various points the Prism players supplied livid hisses, split-tone growls and a near-cartoonish big-band bounce. Mr. Huang's "Five Tenses," from 2005, was meant to express a notion of past, present and future coexisting at once; accordingly, perhaps, he has reworked the piece again and again, fashioning versions for string quartet, brass quintet and more. Here Mr. Huang brought out new shadings in the engaging, eventful work, allying the pipa with the tenor and baritone saxophones to striking effect. Mr. Sheng, in introducing "The Singing Gobi Desert," played down its programmatic title, calling the piece a capriccio or fantasia. Still, like the glassy "singing" sands in the desert of the title, disparate timbres intermingled gently and smoothly in strong melodic themes, which sang out with potency and unambiguous sweetness. Music From China performs in the Ecstatic Music Festival on March 28 at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3330, kaufman-center.org.