The irksome Austrian trio Netnakisum opens the Embassy of Austria's first concert of 2011 tonight. The concert's organizers hope they'll draw a younger audience. (Publicity photo)

If there is a cultural chasm between the cultures of the United States and Austria, it is one best left unfilled by yodeling.

The members of Netnakisum, the young string trio performing tonight at the Embassy of Austria, like hip hop, Deep Purple, and Britney Spears, and they are not afraid to dive into all of the above during their live concerts. But they also yodel — quirkily! And to top off the authentic cultural experience, they perform in their country’s native dress: frilly, cheeky frocks called dirndls.

To be blunt, they’re difficult to watch. I hope that my Germanic heritage shields me from accusations of cultural insensitivity, because I can’t help but compare this group to the very un-funny brainchild of a bunch of high school theater nerds.

Andrea Schammel, the tasteful, savvy director of the Austrian Cultural Forum's Washington chapter, thinks the trio could help attract a fresh audience to cultural events at the embassy. In a city overflowing with classical music by Austrian composers, Schammel doesn’t see the need to double down on tradition. Pursuing the unexpected sounds of Austria’s new music scene is her mission, even if it means booking something a little...off.

“I am sure we’ll have a bunch of younger people there,” she says of tonight’s concert, which is also the ACF's 2011 season opener. “Austrian classical music is present everywhere" in Washington, she says. But yodeling trios? Not so much. The city's abundance of classical music "gives me freedom to present something more avant-garde and different here at the embassy, and this is what I am doing with the concert tomorrow," Schammel says. Netnakisum "combines classical with Austrian folk music in a very individual and extraordinary way.”

The Austrian Cultural Forum is one of the most active embassy-affiliated cultural centers in Washington. Unlike La Maison Francaise, the Embassy of France's cultural center that is largely funded by the French American Cultural Foundation, ACF gets its money from its government — specifically, the Austrian Foreign Ministry, which tasks it with promoting Austrian culture in America. The ACF has partnered with heaps of arts organizations in Washington, including the Phillips Collection, Artisphere, Strathmore, the Washington Performing Arts Society, the Corcoran, and AFI, lending a contemporary Austrian flavor to film festivals, exhibits, and concerts. The ACF's early 2011 lineup stretches across venues and disciplines, from fashion shows to lectures, with a salient theme: modernity.

But like other embassies in Washington, where small budgets and smaller staffs are a constant burden, directly connecting with new audiences is still a work in progress for the ACF.

Schammel saw that the Forum had an outreach problem when she came to the job in August 2008. The first thing she did was take over the website. "I made a new homepage, to get kind of a PR machine started here," she says. "I had a very nice public, a very educated audience, but mostly older people, and I just thought 'I've got to change that.'" She seems content with the progress she has made – many events now draw up to 300 people to the embassy's 350-capacity auditorium. "I am very active for the little budget I have," she says. But with her limited resources, marketing cannot be the ACF's top priority — not when there are artists to pay and trans-Atlantic flight tickets to buy.

I spoke with Netnakisum's manager Ian Smith last night while the jet-lagged trio napped before their show at the ACF's New York outpost. He told me that the cultural center loves them — "to say the least" — and that their New York and D.C. shows are just the latest in a string of Austria-sponsored engagements in Algiers, China, and Rome.

Huh. Well, I still don't get their appeal, but it's probably just a cultural thing.

View the Austrian Cultural Forum's January-February calendar on their website. Tickets to tonight's Netnakisum concert are $5 and can be purchased online.