He was great with young people, and we wanted him involved, but he never stayed for the new-music festival.

The much-admired new-music festival opens, venturing uptown for the first time.

Not that it mattered: if programmatic unruliness has a place anywhere, it's at a new-music festival played by students, faculty and occasional guests.

For listeners with a sense of adventure and all the participants, this exciting new-music festival always engenders happy feelings in the countryside.

Juilliard students, from whom enthusiasm and virtuosity can be virtually guaranteed, are focusing in their annual new-music festival on American music of the present decade.

Not a bad sampling for one of this country's most important new-music festivals.

What would differentiate the Warsaw Autumn from the rest of the world's new-music festivals?

The orchestra played it beautifully, and it's hard not to wish its participation in the new-music festival were more wholehearted.

The new-music festival called Music at the Anthology is now in its fifth season.

LEAD: The new-music festival, which begins today, will run through Wednesday at various clubs around the city.