Gabriel Kahane Is a One-Man Cultural Cuisinart Shannon Taggart for The New York Times Gabriel Kahane at home in Brooklyn. The concert was over, and Gabriel Kahane was standing in his dressing room at Carnegie Hall, dripping with sweat. He had soaked through the T-shirt he performed in - a deep V-neck with "Maybe I should call you when I get back from New York" written on it in a loopy script - and his mop of curly hair was matted down. A garment bag hung over the piano. In it was the dark suit that Kahane, who is 30, had been planning to wear, a more obvious choice for a big night: his debut at Carnegie in March as both a composer and a performer. But one of the young artistic administrators there told Kahane he should wear the T-shirt and a pair of jeans instead. After all, he isn't a classical artist in the mold of, say, Tchaikovsky, who also made a double Carnegie debut, conducting his own "March Solennelle" at the hall's opening in 1891. Kahane's­ activities are far more varied. He released his second pop album, "Where Are the Arms," last fall. And he wrote the music and lyrics for a new musical called "February House" - based on the true story of a Brooklyn Heights mansion where W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee, among others, lived in the 1940s - which opens on May 22 at the Public Theater. He was at Carnegie to play with the American Composers Orchestra on "Crane Palimpsest," a sprawling song cycle that is his first work for full orchestra. In it, Kahane places his own lyrics alongside Hart Crane's classic "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," while the music gradually, ingeniously blurs the line between his sweetly folksy pop style and a dissonant, angular sound like Stravinsky's or Schoenberg's. Kahane's voice, airy but with a smoky burr, is flexible and carries emotional weight easily, but "Crane Palimpsest" is still a lot to take on. He told me a couple of years ago that it had been a combination of "undiagnosed A.D.D. and hubris" that led to his dropping out of his California high school, and that confidence, or hubris, or whatever, is still with him. After leaving high school, Kahane arrived at the New England Conservatory, where he studied jazz piano for a year before ending up, G.E.D. in hand, at Brown. He graduated in 2003, moved to New York and tended bar to make rent. He landed some gigs doing music directing for theater, played the piano on tour with Mark Morris's dance company and in 2006 got the idea for a cycle of songs based on Craigslist posts. "Neurotic and Lonely" gets jittery hilarity out of the personal ad of a "slightly hunched, occasionally employed anthropologist, chain-smoking Jew, currently living with parents." Kahane would perform the quirky songs at downtown bars while other singers began to program them in their recitals at decidedly more upscale places like Carnegie. "Craigslistlieder,"­ as he called it, became a kind of classical-yet-poppy, ironic-yet-musical model. A generation of artists suddenly found the boundaries between genres much more permeable than they used to be - even if classical audiences seem more impressed by Kahane's indie "cred" than the pop world has been by his classical achievements. With little instrumental interludes inserted among the confessional songs, Kahane's self-titled first album, released in 2008, sometimes tried too hard to blend all his interests: it's classical, and pop, and theatrical, all in one, and it's beautiful but exhausting. These days, if he wants to make a comment about crossing genres, he tends to makes that the explicit subject of the piece, as in "Crane Palimpsest." "Where Are the Arms," his second album, is more purely pop than his first, with a shimmering production that recalls the work of Kahane's friend and collaborator Sufjan Stevens. "When I made my first record, I was totally naïve to the idea of being invested in a record as a record," he told me on the train to New Haven, where "February House" had a well-received opening run. I saw it as a document of music. And I think I took in a lot of pop music in the time between the first album and the second one, so "Where Are the Arms" is really preoccupied with sound." That sound is often shiny and smooth, but with complex harmonies and quietly troubled lyrics: the title track's refrain - "Where are the arms/that armed your love?" - explodes a love-song lullaby against a threat of battle. On the train, Kahane compared what he's trying to do to the Bill Evans Trio, whose jazz can come across like cocktail-piano background noise unless you listen closely. "I hope that the details that are in there are unsettling," he said. There's always something just at the moment when it could settle into something that's complacent. There's something that's uneasy. Kahane has thrived on this uneasiness. At the Carnegie performance, he sang well but seemed stressed, shuttling constantly between piano, guitar and microphone. In his dressing room afterward, he looked around, exhausted, at the group of friends waiting to move on to the after-party. "Well," he said with a wry smile. That was rough.