In 1987, drama came to the Park Avenue Armory in the form of John Krizanc’s labyrinthine historic thriller Tamara. Following individual trajectories, each player charted a different course from room to room on different floors, with spectators choosing on the spot whom to rush after in hot pursuit. (There was no way to see all the action in a single go, or even in a few.) Since then, the Armory has become one of the Big Apple’s most adventurous performing-arts venues. This spring, Ten Thousand Birds harks back to Tamara in that the listeners will spend its 70-minute running time on the move. The score by the shamanic John Luther Adams consists of individual pages, each fashioned from birdsong, each (in the composer’s words) “its own self-contained world that occupies its own physical space and its own time.” No running order is specified, nor are musicians obliged to play the whole set, the idea being to select the songs of birds native to the place of performance. In short, no end of artistic decision-making falls to the executants, in this case the new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, whose previous realizations of the work have left audiences on the verge of nirvana. —Matthew Gurewitsch