Gabriela Montero sits at the keyboard of a Steinway piano in the company's 57th St. offices. She looks at the harsh lights above her and asks they be turned off. It's cloudy outside, and the room becomes dark, even gloomy.
Montero places her hands on the keys. Melting sounds fill the room as she improvises on Cole Porter's "I Concentrate on You."
The chords seem closer to 19th-century Germany than say, an old 52nd St. dive, but that is because Montero is a classically trained pianist who regards jazz as a foreign language she is only beginning to explore.
Improvisation is a rarity in the classical world, where pianists are sometimes faulted for taking liberties with the rhythm.
The 36-year-old Montero, who has had an international concert career, is eager to take the risk. Her first album included pieces by Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and others, along with her improvisations on them.
Her new album, "Bach and Beyond," which comes out Tuesday, focuses on the 18th-century master, turning familiar compositions like "Sheep May Safely Graze" and "Toccata in D Minor" into new pieces as richly colored and moving as the originals.
Montero has been improvising literally since she was a toddler in Caracas. When she was only 8 months old, her grandmother asked her mother to put a two-octave toy piano in her crib for her first Christmas.
"It's odd because there were no musicians in my family," she says.
She took to the instrument immediately. Her mother used to sing her lullabies, and she began picking out the tunes on her little piano.
By chance, the leading piano teacher in Caracas lived upstairs, and Gabriela was sent to him for lessons. She began concertizing at the age of 5.
By the time she was a teenager, she was giving concerts all over the world, appearing in - and winning - international competitions.
But when she was 18 and living in Miami, the teacher with whom she was studying made her feel self-conscious about improvising, suggesting it would expose her to ridicule in the concert world.
For two years, Montero shunned the keyboard: "I fell in love, I got married, I volunteered in hospitals. I thought I could live without music."
In her early 20s, she went back to concerts but was aware she was still fighting the negativism that was her teacher's legacy.
Critics have responded to her improvisations warmly - a London critic recently wrote: "She takes classic tunes, rips them up, plays around the themes and reinvents them, burning the rust off some over-familiar music."
Nevertheless, she feels they are often wary of the very idea of improvisation.
"What I'm doing seems 'groundbreaking' in the classical world," Montero says. "I think I'm just bringing back the tradition of several centuries ago - I don't know why improvisation disappeared.
"Ninety-eight percent of the peoplewho listen to me improvise love it - something real is happening, and they're a part of it.
"When you touch a nerve, an emotional nerve - something we all share - it's very honest, very real. People are drawn to it.
"Why do the 2% - the intellectuals, the critics - disagree?
"One reason is this sense that the work of the great composers came out of suffering. With improvisation, there's no suffering. It's about joy, about freedom. I think critics prefer the idea of suffering.
"Even when I'm not improvising I'm conscious that the better we integrate the celebratory and emotional aspects, the more the public will see that classical music is as exciting, as passionate, as engrossing as other types of music."
Montero, a single mother who has lived all over the world, has just moved to Park Slope with her two young daughters.
Although she has performed with the New York Philharmonic in Avery Fisher Hall, her next New York gig is at Joe's Pub on Sept. 21, where, in addition to selections from her new album, she will improvise on themes suggested by the audience.
"It's impossible to 'practice' improvisation," Montero says. "It's a process that has nothing to do with my brain - in fact the more thought becomes involved, the more restricted I feel.
"What comes out every day is not the same. If I listen to African music my improvisations will go in that direction.
"In the end I feel it has nothing to do with me - I'm just a vehicle. It's really about allowing whatever needs to come out to happen, not to interfere with it.
"Now that I've been dipping my toes into other worlds, I find myself asking why classical musicians have this classist attitude. Why can't we, like jazz musicians, explore other kinds of music?
"If what you do is of high quality and it's honest, who can say it's not valid? I'm sure if Mozart were here today, he'd be visiting all the jazz bars in New York, eager to learn new harmonies."