Want to get youth vote? Here's how

There are many foolish attempts to change concert life, such as surveying young people who aren't interested in classical music about what bait would draw them in. Say we served pizza in cellphone-friendly concert halls, installed sofas and video screens, and guaranteed that no "song" would last more than five minutes? What if we made that gourmet pizza and supplied a fine Gewurztraminer to wash it down? Free iPhones to the first 50 who log on to our website?

But over the weekend, five serious young women gave two remarkable concerts here, and they weren't responding to surveys. These exceptional virtuosos have their own ideas about breaking down concert barriers. Resourceful revolutionaries, they don't ask and don't pander but insist on change. And by devising authentic new ways to concertize that feel right for them and their times, they proved magnets for the young.

Saturday afternoon at SCI-Arc, the hip architecture school downtown, a girl-group recorder collective from Germany made its Los Angeles debut as part of the classy Chamber Music in Historic Sites series. The ensemble, Quartet New Generation, was provocative enough to entice fledgling designers away from their computers.

Then, Sunday afternoon at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero spent half of her recital for the classy Philharmonic Society improvising. Little girls went running up to the stage asking her to play things. Although she didn't fill the hall in Irvine, Montero is on her way to celebrity. Her recent CD of improvisations on classical themes is a bestseller. It's also somewhat bland in a brunch-music kind of way, which made her compelling recital all the more surprising.

For the first half, Montero played Schumann's "Carnaval" and Alberto Ginastera's First Sonata with a bold, muscular willfulness. Her tone is big and lustrous -- I'd never heard a piano sound so loud in this hall.

"Carnaval" is a series of character pieces. Pierrot pranced as I'd never known him to prance before. Eusebius' dreams were private, inscrutable. Not everything worked for me, but headstrong freshness gets a listener's attention. In Ginastera's sonata, written by the Argentine composer in 1951, Montero was on percussive fire.

But the improvisations after intermission were the heart of the afternoon. Seated cross-legged at the piano, Montero asked for themes on which to improvise. "Happy Birthday" caught her fancy, and she took the tune on a tour from Bach to Haydn to Beethoven to something Latin. The so-called Albinoni Adagio had a similar, but more ornate, trajectory.