Jherek Bischoff hijacked a string quartet made of local musicians recruited to perform with Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra of which Bischoff is the bassist. Whatever. It worked brilliantly. He lead them through a short set of mostly instrumental songs made up of original compositions from his new album released last month, Composed. Bischoff pulled off a command performance with his back often to the audience, in order to orchestrate the arrangements with his new recruits. At one point, he traded his guitar for ukelele and plucked the shit out of it. The music was dynamic, fluid and utterly captivating. Bischoff has a somewhat understated presence onstage until he starts strumming and then he vibrates like an instrument himself.

Gorgeous. Not the transvestite stage spectacle and loud queer politicizing I expected, but rather a focus on the music, which is more beautiful and orchestral than I realized from their studio recordings. I finally understand why they’re described as chamber pop. Young cute Canadians – maybe not cute – they were each a little dorky and odd in their own way. The lead singer pleased me with his tall lankiness and dark eyes, and his distinctive prettily quirky voice that warms me like the sound of a well-liked familiar friend. There were two fiddlers, a keyboardist, an occasional trumpeter, a drummer – maybe 7 or 8 people on stage total? Their songs are complicated but hooky, like The Shins but more comfortable. They toy with sounds and their voices and the instrumentation in a sophisticated and sonically pleasing way. They’re often billed as “gay church folk music,” and part of what attracted me to them in the first place was their blaspheming of religious imagery by jumbling it up with explicit homosexual lyrics. While there is something majestic and holy in their sound, the term “folk” doesn’t do credit to their sound. This band and I were meant for each other.

The Harvard Pops Orchestra, led by conductor Allen Feinstein, performed a classical piece, the limbo and an original composition for the showcase as part of Arts First at Harvard University. Feinstein couched the performance as “how a garden hose can inspire classical music” before launching into a version of Limbo with the garden hose as the limbo stick and members of the orchestra performing the limbo. The final piece featured a soloist using the garden hose as a horn. It sounds indelicate, but the entire performance was polished, surprising and thoroughly enjoyable.