Kate Hatmaker and Demarre McGill, the two young San Diego Symphony musicians who created the hip chamber music series “Art of Élan” at the San Diego Museum of Art, audaciously claim their programs have “brought back the excitement of classical music.” With four musically successful seasons behind them and a string of sold-out programs this spring, they have proved their claim is not mere public relations blather.

Tuesday’s (May 3) concert—the current season finale—began some 20 minutes late because the museum discovered that half again as many eager fans as were already packed into the Hibben Room were willing to pay for tickets to sit in the adjacent hallway (actually a small rotunda) and listen to the music waft through the open doorway. So the staff hastily set up another 50 chairs to accommodate the “overflow.” You have to be doing something right to engender such enthusiasm.

McGill and Hatmaker have created a successful series that brilliantly refutes the orthodox canons followed by the region’s other chamber music series, especially those ensconced in the usual La Jolla venues. Programs at Sherwood Auditorium, the Athenaeum and the Neurosciences Institute adhere the the unwavering two-hour format, filled with recognized composers (i.e., dead), and rigorously avoid anything recent and cutting edge, unless it is under three minutes’ duration. And the inclusion of vocalists is a rarity.

Tuesday’s Art of Élan program was typical of its formula: the concentrated program lasted only 75 minutes; the major pieces were composed within the last few years, and each varied wildly in instrumentation, from Eve Beglarian’s solo alto flute with pre-recorded audio to David Bruce’s lone soprano accompanied by an 11-piece chamber ensemble that included mandolin, harp and percussion. Of course, new and exotic alone are not sufficient to make a winning program, and Hatmaker-McGill fortunately possess the perception to select the worthy from the merely novel.

David Bruce’s song 2009 song cycle “The North Wind Was a Woman,” written for soprano Dawn Upshaw, appropriately dominated the program. This vividly scored, emotionally turbulent 25-minute work reminded me at once of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” not because Bruce imitated in any way Barber’s harmonic vocabulary, but because this work exuded an equally passionate immediacy and rich instrumentation that dared you to remain outside of its vibrant command. Soprano Susan Narucki interpreted Bruce’s five contrasting poems with psychological acumen and authoritative vocal dexterity.

Unlike the Romantic poets of the 19^th century, who saw nature as the flattering background of romance, Bruce’s poems (two are actually his own) make nature the romantic protagonists. Bruce turned the fourth poem, “The Crescent Moon is a Dangerous Lunatic” (by Alasdair Middleton), into a careening car chase, a pulsating Expressionist rant that proved as ravishingly beautiful as it was violent. And Narucki proved more than equal to its challenge.

I cannot begin to describe the extent of Bruce’s inventive instrumentation throughout the work in a short review, but let me highlight his mesmerizing combination of harp and mandolin, contrasting plucked sounds that he wove into a sonorous magic carpet, notably in the opening poem “The Snow Is Completely Without Hope.” This cycle, at least in my perception, is much more successful than his rather unfocused 2008 “Gumboots,” which Art of Élan presented early in this season, and “North Wind” stands head and shoulders above Oswaldo Golijov’s much admired but overwritten “Ainadamar” arias, also written for Dawn Upshaw.

If the opening pieces in the program did not quite match Bruce’s brilliance, they did pave the way. Chen Yi’s “Yangko” turned a solo violin into a dancing village shaman, which violinist Jung Yan incarnated with great skill, her fleet, skittering ornaments nicely contrasting with her austere, vibrato-free sustained tones in the instrument’s highest register. A cello octet, Caleb Burhans’ “The Things Left Unsaid,” flirted with both minimalism and microtonalism, although it may have been more fun for the cellists than for the audience.

Flutist McGill crafted sensuous sustained themes in Beglarian’s “I Will Not Be Sad in This World,” an Armenian second cousin to Arvo Pärt’s more familiar minimalist sonic portraits, although there were too many varied sounds in the audio tape. It made the live flute difficult to discern and made this listener wonder if the whole thing could not simply put on a disc with equal effect.

Surprisinglly—or not, really—the piece that most equalled the emotional impact of Bruce’s song cycle was cellist Lars Hoefs’ bravura, no-holds-barred interpretation of Alessandro Scarlatti’s “Cello Sonata in D Minor,” smartly and incisively accompanied by Ines Irawati on harpsichord. Did I mention that Hatmaker-McGill also know how to mix early music and contemporary repertory with pitch-perfect calculation?

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