Review: After a Concert, a Nightcap to Demystify New Music

NEW YORK — When a major orchestra performs the premiere of a new work, the piece is typically just dropped into an otherwise traditional program. The audience gets one crack at hearing it. And that’s that.

Enter the New York Philharmonic’s Nightcap series, a new venture whose aim is to acquaint audiences with living composers featured in subscription programs by way of cabaretlike, post-concert events at Lincoln Center’s intimate Kaplan Penthouse.

The inaugural Nightcap took place late Friday, with an inventive, hourlong program organized by 24-year-old composer Conrad Tao following a performance of his “Everything Must Go,” which had its premiere Thursday as a kind of prelude to Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

Both Nightcap and another contemporary music series, Sound On — which has its debut Sunday at the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, with a focus on Dutch composer Louis Andriessen — take the place of Contact, the new-music series Alan Gilbert had introduced during his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director. These new ventures are meant to be more informal. Still, Tao’s Nightcap could have used a little more music and a little less chitchat, though all the comments about the pieces were helpful.

But demystifying contemporary music is essential work. Nightcap was a good start.

At the penthouse Friday, Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s new music director, introduced Tao, whom he first got to know as a prodigious 16-year-old pianist. (He spends most his time on the concert pianist circuit.) Van Zweden said that, having commissioned Tao several times over the years, he had asked him to write a piece inspired by the Bruckner symphony that would segue — without a pause — into its first movement. But, as he explained, he hoped the Philharmonic audience would sort of feel that the Bruckner “was inspired by Conrad.” If only van Zweden had thought to offer these charming, revealing comments to the audience at Geffen Hall the night of the premiere.

The Nightcap program, hosted by violist and new-music specialist Nadia Sirota, demonstrated the breadth of Tao’s skills and curiosity. In a nod to Bruckner, he began with his arrangement of the composer’s “Ave Maria” choral motet, utilizing Vocaloid, a synthesizer choir. The voices sounded eerily (yet endearingly) high-pitched, nasal and slippery like a Bruckner motet performed by Alvin and the Chipmunks, embedded in the overall electronic weirdness of Tao’s music. This was no joke, but rather a young composer’s attempt to reanimate Bruckner through contemporary musical language and technology.

He then introduced a close colleague, dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher, who joined him for an arrangement of another Bruckner motet, “Christus Factus Est.” With Tao on the piano, Teicher tap danced on a platform, sprinkled with sand that lent gritty sounds to his elegant gyrations. Later, joined by experimental vocalist Charmaine Lee, they performed a freewheeling improvisation, mixing the sounds of Teicher’s sand-scraping footsteps; Tao’s digital groans, static and thuds; and Lee’s array of sustained tones, whispered words, gurgling sounds and vocal effects.

For the final piece, Tao and Lee performed a structured improvisation that segued into “Heavy Rain,” a song he wrote last year with words stitched together from poems by a friend. But I only learned these details after the performance. I wish that, during his conversation with Sirota, Tao had spent more time explaining the pieces he was about to perform. To be a true bridge between composers and audiences, Nightcap events should be informative as well as informal.

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Nightcap

Performed Friday at the Kaplan Penthouse, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org.