While NYC is hailed by art-appreciators for the ubiquitous venues of all-things-art, the local barge underneath the Brooklyn Bridge is certainly of the most distinctive spaces for classical work. Calling itself “New York City’s floating concert hall,” Bargemusic presents music five days a week during the entire year with a diverse lineup of artists, from classical chamber groups to funky percussion soloists. Although the floating venue, however excitingly floatable it may be, is still a regular chamber music venue, Bargemusic has a hip, eccentric vibe that other venues cannot help but lack. After all, Bargemusic is on the watery edge of the charming Fulton Ferry Landing, and not to mention, displays a background of a lovely NYC skyline over a pretty East River.

So on the perfectly clear night of Friday, July 3rd, Bargemusic presented the sweet and quirky pianist, David Kaplan, as part of their yearly concert series. While Kaplan was (and is), no-doubt, a talented, charming, up-and-coming pianist, perhaps what was most interesting about his performance was his program choice. Instead of a set composer and set era to perform, Kaplan chose a plethora of composers and a plethora of eras, to perform.

In the very beginning, Kaplan took stage amidst a sun-setting harbor and modestly confessed his un-unprecedented-ness in music choice. After his burst of honesty, he advised the endeared audience to pay close attention to his construction of genre sections for his program. For although Kaplan chose some commonly-chosen piano sonatas, he did so from extremely varying eras, and then chopped up the four-or-five-movement genres into four of his own sections to perform (Prelude, Scherzo, Romance, Presto); each containing a different movement from baroque, romantic, classical, and even contemporary eras.

And you can bet Kaplan’s wild construction took many in the audience by surprise, many even animatedly discussed his musically-scandalous-doings before and after the performance. For even if the audience had heard Bach’s Partita No. 4 in D Major (BMV 828) a hundred times before, Kaplan’s context now made the movement completely different. By snipping movements of various piano pieces of various music eras and strategically and un-randomly combining them in, what may have appeared to be, random genres, Kaplan created a surprising idea of similarity among a group of utterly different eras.

Interestingly, the juxtaposition between Kaplan’s movements of diverse eras highlighted the era differences so much that it was quite engaging to listen for their concealed connections. While the Romantic era is absurdly alien to Baroque, Kaplan smartly split pieces from romantic, baroque, etc., and combined them together; it was intriguing to hear each era’s interpretation. Take Kaplan’s Presto section, which included works by Bach, Rachmaninoff, Bartok, Beethoven, and Brahms — indubitably, Bach and Rachmaninoff, for example, do not have similar styles in the slightest, however, the Presto aspect was fully present in the Gigue movement of the Partita just as much as Rachmaninoff’s Etude-tableaux in a minor. Of course, Bach’s traditional, meticulous Baroque-sounding sonata was worlds away from Bartok’s dark, intense, chromatic Sostenuto from Suite, Op. 14, Sz. 62, yet the presto genre was individualistically present for each era — thoroughly conveying Kaplan’s idea of unity within diversity.