A new home for adventurous music?
Not to be overshadowed by the opening of the Institute of Contemporary Art 's sleek new waterfront home is a sleek new performance venue that the museum opened at the same time: the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater . Visually speaking, it is a gem within a gem. And with its first season of programming -- including dance, music, theater, film , and lectures -- just underway, it is taking on a life of its own.
The theater's debut musical event took place Friday night: a double-bill under the title of "Classical Mashup ." The first half was given over to the pianist Bruce Brubaker playing Haydn sonatas while composer Nico Muhly , on laptop and electronic keyboards, commented with sampled sound. The second half featured Donal Fox and his trio performing "Mashups in Blue" a set of inventive jazz inspired by classical works. The event was sold out and the energetic crowd who filled the theater's bright orange seats seemed as eclectic as any music audience I've seen in Boston.
There is plenty to say about both halves of the evening -- the intriguing Muhly/Brubaker collaboration would have benefit ed from more assertive digital "graffiti" -- but the real news here is the space itself as a welcome new performing-arts venue. The back wall and one side of this inviting theater are both glass, so the stage itself feels serenely enveloped by water, making for a backdrop that is both mellow and entrancing. At one point in the slow movement of a Haydn sonata on Friday night, a boat glided silently by.
The potential of the space is vast. As part of the new ICA, with its futuristic building, its magnificent location, and its commitment to contemporary arts, this theater has the chance to become an exciting hub for inventive and bold programs, a space known for cutting-edge performances by adventurous artists working provocatively within and across different disciplines. The winter/spring line up that has been announced is a hopeful start, but there is plenty of room to grow, especially in the ICA's rather limited musical offerings.
The stage is 2,500 square feet , large enough to accommodate, conceivably, a new music band or a chamber orchestra. All of the music on Friday night was amplified so it was impossible to evaluate the space's natural acoustics. But it appears to be versatile and well-equipped for multimedia performances. Shades can be lowered over the glass walls to make it into a black box theater, though there is no fly space, which will limit the size of sets and props that can be used.
The ICA space has two key factors in its favor. First, its seating capacity. With only 325 seats it should be much easier to take risks on booking events knowing that one need not sell out a space the size of Symphony Hall or even Jordan Hall. Second , the theater is, at least for the moment, not considering selling tickets through subscription series -- a powerful tool for ticket sales but also a format that tends to breed more conservative programming.
The inaugural schedule has some promising events, including the premiere of a new dance work by Mark Morris, set to Kyle Gann 's "Nude Rolling Down an Escalator ." But the ICA's own music programming is limited to just one additional event: the Ying Quartet playing a work by Tod Machover on April 6. The museum has turned over its space to CRASHarts , part of World Music Inc., to present a large portion of the music and dance events that will take place there. The two groups will be in partnership for at least the museum's first two years, with CRASHarts presenting at least 25 nights of mostly contemporary dance, according to David Henry , the ICA's director of programs. (Next week, CRASHarts will present the locally based Alloy Orchestra performing live scores for silent films.)
World Music/CRASHarts is a distinguished local presenter, and the shows it is bringing to the ICA look enticing. But the museum should not miss the chance to establish its own brand identity in programming. Partly for this very reason, the ICA, according to Henry, will not be renting its theater out to other local performing arts groups, though it is available for special-events rental. When asked about his own broader programming vision, Henry spoke of favoring performances that blur disciplinary and media boundaries and are connected to the museum's larger mission of presenting the arts, as he put it, "in conversation with 21st-century culture."
Let's hope that, as the theater moves forward, that mission is interpreted widely to include adventurous and cosmopolitan programming not just in dance but also in music. In the future, perhaps guest curators could be brought in to help program exciting mini-festivals, possibly tied thematically to current exhibits. There are plenty of path - breaking artists, both young and established, whose work fits the ICA's mission and would flourish in a setting like this. The jazz pianist Uri Caine comes to mind for his powerful, downtown deconstructions of the life and music of Gustav Mahler ; Peter Sellars has created a simple yet electrifying staging of epigrams from Kafka's letters and diaries as set by the brilliant Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag ; the cellist Maya Beiser has collaborated in creative ways with the Iranian video artist Shirin Neshat . And this list could go on and on.
If not these particular artists, this is at least territory that the ICA would be wise to claim for its own programming mix. Elsewhere on the local museum map, Dan Hirsch has been carving out his own hip programming turf at the Museum of Fine Arts, where the indie foursome Grizzly Bear performed a sold-out show the same night as the "Classical Mashup." The ICA now has the opportunity to strengthen its own brand by announcing itself as the destination of choice for bracing and imaginative contemporary fare across the performing arts. It has an ideal space for it, and the local audience for these offerings is hardly over-served. The niche, in short, is there for the taking, and the city's arts scene would be stronger for it.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com. 
