Since 1985 the University of Louisville has administered the annual Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, a prize that carries a large purse  the last one was $200,000  and ample prestige. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the award, the university fielded a large, flexible faculty ensemble, the Grawemeyer Players, and on Tuesday evening at Weill Recital Hall the group made its New York debut with a program of works by prizewinners (though not the winning works, which are mostly orchestral scores).

Except for a short cello work by Witold Lutoslawski, the first Grawemeyer recipient, the program focused on recent winners, starting with Gyorgy Kurtag (who won in 2006) and including Sebastian Currier (2007), Peter Lieberson (2008), Brett Dean (2009) and this year’s winner, York Höller.

A listener handicapping the award jury’s tastes, based on this sampling, might conclude that composers who write in an accessible, traditional style  not aggressively dissonant but not facile either  have a distinct edge. But that would be incorrect: the award has also gone to composers like Pierre Boulez and Harrison Birtwistle, at the thorny end of the spectrum, and John Adams and Tan Dun, representing post-Minimalism and world-music hybrids.

Image The pianist Naomi Oliphant and the soprano Edith Davis Tidwell, part of the Grawemeyer Players, at Weill Recital Hall. Credit... Richard Termine for The New York Times

Mr. Kurtag’s music typically veers toward corrosive modernism, but the acidic side of his harmonic language was tempered in “The Little Predicament” (1978). Scored quirkily for piccolo, trombone and guitar, this comic piece parodies Mussorgsky and Stravinsky before moving on to a flighty, pointillistic scherzo and a calm, sober finale that seemed almost out of place after the antics of the first three movements.