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Chad Michael Hall, a professional dancer and dance teacher at Loyola Marymont University, and Yuk

What’s fresher than the latest club banger from Akon or Jay-Z?

Think back to Russia around World War I, when composers Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky became greats because of their innovative contributions to classical music at such a pivotal time in history.

Prokofiev’s “Trapeze” and Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” will be performed Thursday at 6 p.m. during “A Night of Russian Chamber Music,” part of the Fowler Out Loud series in the Lenart Auditorium at the Fowler Museum.

Chelsea Howell, a doctorate student in the UCLA Department of Music and the event’s artistic director, had the idea to complement these two musical pieces with as many other art forms as she could.

Musicians, choreographers, dancers, actors and UCLA faculty have blended their talents to turn this would-be concert into a more diverse artistic experience.

“The more different forms of art that you use together, the more interesting a performance is,” Howell said. “You can hear in the music that it lends itself to something visual, so it appealed to me to do something that I thought would be accurate to the music and the composer and also entertaining to watch.”

The instruments used in these two pieces mirror the event’s spirit of artistic fusion. The oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and string bass included in “Trapeze” are seldom combined in classical chamber music.

Making the piece even more rare, the quintet version of “Trapeze” was only fully pieced together in 2003, when a musicologist found its two missing movements.

The second movement was composed later and the finale existed as part of “The Prodigal Son.”

The piece has only been performed with ballet a few times since its recovery, making tomorrow’s performance a must-see opportunity.

“(‘Trapeze’) is very dissonant, but it’s also very beautiful,” Howell said. “It was really fun for me to see the dancers choreograph something to go with it. It’s interesting to see what people will do when they hear a piece of music, and how they convey that through another art form.”

Similarly, Stravinsky’s piece, “The Soldier’s Tale,” was written for a smaller number of musicians rather than an entire orchestra, partly because so many musicians were gone when it was written, off fighting in World War I.

“He had to use what he could,” said Dan Cummings, a doctor of musical arts student and the conductor for the piece. “Stravinsky, who was famous for lush and opulent Russian ballets written for very large orchestras, was cut off from his resources. He needed to make money, but he needed a smaller group. This piece spawned a lot of others written for small and odd chamber orchestras.”

Tomorrow night, Cummings will conduct musicians playing the trumpet, trombone, clarinet, violin, bassoon, string bass and percussion in “The Soldier’s Tale,” a piece known for its unusual rhythms.

With such a small number of musicians, a conductor is not often needed, but “The Soldier’s Tale” is an exception to that norm.

Simeon Den, the choreographer of the event and a fourth-year world arts and cultures student, also embraced the challenges of working with such a “rhythmic tour de force,” as Cummings calls it. Along with creating choreography to match the music, Den found ways to animate the musical story using modern visuals.

“It is very complicated for dance because the time signatures change,” Den said. “The challenge also was making the piece appealing to people who are not familiar with it by adding the visual aspects of the piece. The soldier is in modern-day wear, for example. It’s not Disney-fied, but it’s updated so that people of this age can relate more to it.”

Just as Prokofiev and Stravinsky worked to make their music accessible and important to their era, those involved in Thursday’s production also are adapting to new obstacles facing the fine arts.

“It’s getting harder and harder to sell an evening of chamber music unless you get really creative about it,” said Cummings.

“A lot of times, it involves collaboration. Seeing all these talented and creative people in different fields come together to make this is an amazing thing. You really can’t see anything like this anywhere else.”