Lyrica Chamber Music to present Shuffle Concert

Ever feel like jumping up out of your seat at a concert and shouting, "Play Mozart"? Of course not. You're much too refined ever to make a spectacle of yourself like that.

But Lyrica Chamber Music's Shuffle Concert on Sunday in Chatham Township gives audience members a chance to do something akin to that. The audience picks the music; the Shuffle Concert Ensemble plays it.

The brainchild of pianist Eliran Avni and some of his musician colleagues, the Shuffle Concert Ensemble has been doing these performances for five years, in places as far apart as California and Israel.

The apple-falling-from-the-tree moment came when Avni was working out on an elliptical machine and his MP3 player jumped from a Pretenders song to Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony.

"It was like time-traveling," he later said. "One minute I was in an '80s dance club and the next in the Siberian wastelands. So I thought to myself, how incredible it would be to perform a concert like that, where the entire program would be based on these extreme stylistic juxtapositions, and I could then take the audience time traveling with me!"

Here's how it works: As they enter the church Sunday, audience members will be given a menu with an individual number on it. The menu, laid out very much like the menu at a restaurant, includes 33 short compositions or songs, some of them single movements from longer works.

When the concert is ready to begin, Avni, using a random number generator on his smartphone, will pick a number. The audience member who has that number on his menu gets to select the first piece of music.

After that choice is played by the ensemble, another number is picked and another audience member is placed in control of the program. The process is repeated until 12 or 14 compositions have been played.

There are rules to ensure the concert has a wide variety of music. The menu is divided into categories, such as Baroque, Americana, Broadway, Latin, French Music, Art Song, Pop/Rock and so on, each with two or three selections. Once a piece of music has been chosen from a category, that category is eliminated from further consideration.

"We've only been getting very warm and enthusiastic feedback," Avni said. "If you can imagine being in a Middle Eastern country (Israel), the responses are very rambunctious, enthusiastic and loud, and people have fights over what's going to be played next. It's a lot of fun.

"American audiences tend to be a little bit more reserved in that respect, but it's pretty much the same."

Avni recalled a concert in Merkin Hall in New York City. The selected audience member wanted to hear a Broadway song, and the person sitting next to him couldn't restrain himself from saying, "Oh, no!"

So the Lyrica audience is advised to make its choices wisely. Fellow listeners may not approve. Plus there may be money riding on the selections. Avni said the musicians sometimes make bets backstage on what music will be played.

"I've lost a lot of money," Avni said.

No two Shuffle Concert menus are ever the same. They are always changing incrementally as the ensemble learns what music works and what doesn't.

There is always some contemporary music on the menu, often pieces that Shuffle Concert has commissioned for its performances. Given American audiences' antipathy towards modern music, who would ever pick a contemporary composition?

"You'd be surprised," Avni said. "Since this is not majority rule, it's not the whole audience picks what's going to be next. One person gets to be lucky for five minutes and getting to decide what happens. Somehow there's always one person in the audience who's curious to hear contemporary chamber music, so one of those pieces will get chosen."

The Shuffle Concert Ensemble is left with having possibly to play any one of 33 different pieces of music. Can they possibly rehearse all 33 for Sunday's concert?

"Yes we can and yes we will," Avni said firmly. "It was sort of an unwritten rule from day one that we started it, we would never compromise at all the performance because of the concert."

The instrumentalists, besides Avni on piano, include strings, oboe and clarinet as well as a soprano.

It would spoil the surprise to reveal everything on the menu. But a little peek shows music by Mozart and Bjork, Brahms and Sondheim, Ravel and Bernstein, and many others.

When Lyrica co-artistic directors Adam Waite and David Kaplan were discussing the 2014-15 season, Kaplan mentioned that he had some friends who were doing this concert series.

"I thought, 'We've got to have these guys,' " said Waite, who had thought of the idea of a shuffle concert years earlier. "And then to know what they were doing. They were going to take it one step further where there's this audience interaction."

Waite, when asked what would be his choice from the menu if he had first pick, showed no hesitation in choosing the Overture to Bernstein's "Candide."

Avni mentioned that the first piece the ensemble will play will be the result of an online vote. Any concert goer who wants to participate can go to facebook.com/events/1531299303798597/.

LYRICA CHAMBER MUSIC

WHAT: Shuffle Concert

WHEN: 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 15

WHERE: Presbyterian Church of Chatham Township, 240 Southern Blvd., Chatham Township

TICKETS: $25; $20 for seniors

INFO: 973-309-1668; lyricachambermusic.org