After last night's Celebrate Brooklyn show, I hopped on the train all the way to midtown, arriving just in time for the latest installment of Tristan and Lesley's Stepgaard, which makes new music the centerpiece of a regular ol' house party. Last night's edition featured the extraordinary young pianist Isabelle O'Connell: an expat native of Dublin now based in NYC. For the price of a 6 pack (or, in some cases, a 40 of 8 Ball), we got an amazing set of challenging, electronically-enhanced music by Lainie Fefferman, Ken Steen, James Mobberley and Donnacha Dennehy, whose "Reservoir" is the title track of Izzy's new album (which you can listen to online here.) At one point, the smoke alarm randomly went off, and Izzy went right on playing, as if it were just another one of Tristan's electronic manipulations.

Izzy even played a handful of selections from George Crumb's Makrokosmos, which required her to play inside and out of Tristan's baby grand, causing a creepy racket. It was no less startling than when I saw Margaret Leng Tan play it for Crumb's 75th birthday at Zankel in 2004, perhaps more so given our proximity to the piano. 

What  want to know is: who are all these cool young kids who like to listen to tricky, delicate piano music late at night? I don't know, but I definitely want hang out with them more.