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Russell Platt's new Concerto for Bassoon and Strings is a lock to become a standard work for bassoonists aspiring to more than sideman status in classical music.

Peter Kolkay, a brilliant young exponent of the instrument, played the piece with the Waukesha Symphony on Sunday afternoon. Platt's idiomatic writing made the instrument sound good, and Kolkay's warm, commanding playing made Platt's striking melodies sound wonderful.

In his program notes, Platt cited the influence of Schoenberg and Copland, among others, on his 1997 Bassoon Quintet, which the composer transformed into the concerto this year. But my ear detected far more Debussy and Stravinsky in the mix, with maybe a little Bartok in the finale. The first movement is dreamy and deliciously overripe, rather like "Afternoon of Faun." A hint of jazz harmony, as understood by European ears early in the last century, spiced up the middle section.

This concerto, as familiar as it might sound at first hearing, is no mere echo of music past. Platt's own ideas about the interaction of form and harmony are intriguing, and his ways of knotting up and - presto! - untying chords are clever and satisfying. The first movement, for example, turns on open, watery, Impressionist harmonies that collapse ever so gradually into dissonant clusters. He builds his large-scale climax on this original but easily grasped idea. Platt reverses and compresses this trick in the second movement, in which clusters expand and resolve in pairs of chords beneath a singing, meandering melody. Ostinatos built on repeating, crunchy little dissonances drive a cheerful, dancing finale.

Nepotism is not always a bad thing. Alexander Platt, Russell's twin brother and music director of the WSO, conducted with great zeal and understanding.

I appreciate compositional craft when I hear it, and Russell Platt's Sonata for Violin and Piano had much in the way of melodic charm and formal invention to engage the audience of about 150 at Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall. Platt's sonata, composed over a three-year period, stylistically is all over the map, with passages that evoke (but do not quote) Prokofiev, Gershwin, Brahms and the chord progressions of jazz pianists such as Horace Silver or Thelonious Monk. Platt has discovered a way to blend these very different styles together so that the listener is carried along in a sort of thrilling auditory bumper car ride, never progressing in a straight line, but zigzagging this way and that, lurching forward, backward and sideways. There were audible gasps of delight from the audience as the music alighted now and then on a sumptuous chord, ending a section or phrase, or when, in the third movement, "Lamentoso (Chaconne)," Platt channeled Bach by way of Brahms with a melody that could have been written by Rachmaninoff.

This is musical postmodernism. All styles are grist for the mill in any manner of assemblage that works, creating a sort of uberstyle. Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) used a similar approach, dubbed "polystylism." And of course Ives and Bernstein were amalgamators as well...Yet, I didn't feel Platt's Sonata was simply a gloss on older music embedded within a mildly dissonant texture to make it palatable; his music has substance and an individual voice, and this is where craft meets imagination....(the) work received an authoritative performance by violinist Joanna Kurkowicz and pianist Doris Stevenson.