Jay Harvey Upstage

The Ebene String Quartet' s return visit under Ensemble Music Society auspices Wednesday night confirmed the excellence that the four Frenchmen exhibited here in 2011. The Ebene Quartet made its second appearance here Wednesday. Each of the works performed is highly characteristic (yet boundary-stretching) of its composer, ranging from the adventurous harmonies of Mozart's Quartet in E-flat, K. 428, on through Mendelssohn's weighty String Quartet in A minor, op. 13, No. 2, to Robert Schumann's controlled-bipolar Quartet in A major, op. 41, no. 3. Starting with the Schumann, which had the second half of the program at Indiana History Center to itself, the Ebene Quartet exemplified the French virtues of clarity and order. That didn't keep them from emphasizing the German composer's skill at projecting the two contrasting sides of his personality, however. The daydreaming first-movement themes, for example, are at times supported by lightly agitated acco...

Among the comments on my "Rage Against Rock" rant, a post I relinked to the other day, was a fascinating recommendation from a local musician I respect. He said I should  give a listen to a band called Deerhoof and its song "Chatterboxes." Having done so, I feel once again the sorrows of most pop attempts to play upon feelings. Here's part of why I don't listen to today's pop music, even at the exploratory fringes: It tends to be derivative in ways that seldom give much room to original expression, either vocally or instrumentally. In "Chatterboxes," during the first few minutes of its chattering guitar textures, I was immediately put in mind of a 1977 recording by performer/composer Allan Bryant called "Space Guitars: Music for New String Instruments" (CRI). Nothing wrong about having new music remind you of old music, but I suspect Deerhoof is considered innovative in its realm. So much for that.  I don't know if the band kn...

Serious, substantial music generated an abundance of joy at Friday's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concert. The performances of Andre Watts at the piano and Krzysztof Urbanski on the podium get the credit for spanning such a wide expressive range so well. Works as enthralling as Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major and Dvorak's Symphony No. 7 in D minor don't play themselves, so interpreters of this stature, buoyed by an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in fine fettle, are required to seal the deal. The world-class 67-year-old pianist, approaching a decade of service on the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music faculty, is a Hoosier by adoption — luckily for us. He has been in the public eye and ear for as long as the Rolling Stones , and produced much better music. His performances carry an elder-statesman veneer without scanting either freshness or depth. Andre Watts is always welcome here. After a spate of smudged chords in his opening caden...

The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel moved quickly to the top of the metropolitan heap in the area of giving local exposure to international representatives of the performing arts. Sometimes this exposure helps confirm the value of what we have locally, among other benefits. It also offers a benchmark — either higher or lower on the scale, according to taste — of how standard repertoire pieces are treated today. That was one positive part of my mixed response to the appearance of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra Wednesday night at the Palladium.  The concert had moments of coordinated energy, an arresting interpretive flair (especially from the piano soloist) and, it can't be denied, the ability to arouse audience enthusiasm. But in works by Weber, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven, the Israeli orchestra's performance also displayed stodginess and imprecision and, to zero in on the most persistent example (the horns), technical inadequacy. As conducted by Boguslaw Dawidow, ...

Augustin Hadelich , gold medalist in the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis , has made good on the award in many ways. One of them is the conspicuous variety of musical contexts  in which he appears that do much more than put himself on the touring-virtuoso pedestal. With the Spanish guitarist Pablo Sainz Villegas , he has recorded a disc named for the finale in a program the IVCI presented Tuesday night at the Indiana History Center, "Histoire du Tango." And Sainz Villegas and Hadelich have a multimedia recital in the works (adding pianist Joyce Yang) for the Kennedy Center in April called "Tango, Song, and Dance." For the near-capacity audience here, the guitarist and violinist displayed duo sensitivity of a kind that could have you thinking they'd been performing together for decades, but both musicians, in their 30s, are way too young. The repertoire leans toward the slight side, but when the partnership is as simpatico as this one,  ...

In the down-at-the-heels environment of Trip's Garage, an Obama election poster strikes an optimistic note. But the poster,  toward the rear of James Gross' set in the Phoenix Theatre 's "North of the Boulevard," is taped into place to hide splits in a tree-damaged wall that the proprietor can't get any insurance relief to repair. Trip similarly is challenged to patch up his care-worn optimism and the goodheartedness that spurs him to open his auto-repair shop to a come-one, come-all Christmas party every year, despite being taken advantage of by street people stuffing snacks into their pockets. In the course of Bruce Graham's play, he becomes as desperate as the people who regularly hang out at the shop to move "North of the Boulevard" — to a neighborhood that still offers the promise of the American dream. Bear (Ben Rose) tells Zee (Rich Komenich) how things look to him. The play, which opened over the weekend in a Midwest premiere pro...

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and music director Krzysztof Urbanski will begin their fourth season together next Sept. 14 with an Opening Night Gala featuring one of the most acclaimed of current American concert pianists, Jeremy Denk, playing Beethoven's Concerto No. 1 in C major. Jeremy Denk will be the gala guest soloist. The Hilbert Circle Theatre gala is one of eight programs with Urbanski on the podium. Two of them will have the 31-year-old Polish maestro giving extra star power to three successive weekends with a common theme, titled "Fantasy, Fate and War: A Midwinter Russian Festival." Philippe Quint will be guest soloist in Aram Khachaturian's Violin Concerto the first weekend (Jan. 23 and 24), in a program also including the Rimsky-Korsakov favorite "Scheherazade." The concluding program, with just one performance (Feb. 6), will have Urbanski conducting the first ISO performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 ("Leningrad...

By the time 21-year-old student conductor Yuri Azevedo bounded onstage at the Palladium Thursday to lead his Bahia Orchestra Project colleagues in three encores, the center of musical energy had long since passed from standard repertoire into music reflective of the characteristic rhythms and melodies of Latin America. The printed program had concluded with two movements from "Bachianas Brasileiras" No. 4, by the chief Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Arturo Marquez's shining tribute to his Cuban homeland's "danzon" rhythm, "Danzon No. 2." That primed the pump for the exuberance to follow. And there was choreography — standing, swaying, dancing — to match the high spirits in performances of such pieces as the "Mambo" from Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story" and the pop standard "Brazil," made famous by Frank Sinatra. The performances were a little loose in terms of precision, ...

My first financially rewarded piece of music criticism earned me a quarter, long before I ever thought of doing it professionally. I was about 10 years old and visiting my mother's family down in Virginia, grouped around a huge family reunion.  They were all Southerners except for her, and my impression of my second cousins was how different they were. I was told how Lee could have won the Civil War if not for the Yankee blockade of the Confederacy's ports (Happy Birthday, Abe!). I was laughed at for unwittingly using a basement bathroom at my hosts' home  that was intended for the exclusive use of the "colored" maid. One of my cousins showed me his record collection, including a single of Elvis Presley singing "Blue Suede Shoes."  But he insisted it was Carl Perkins singing.  I looked at the label: Carl Perkins' name was in parentheses right under the song title, in small print. Below that, in larger type, was "Elvis Presley." "...

A great example of cross-cultural interaction brought Gabriela Lena Frank to town in 2009 for the premiere of an extended piece, "Peregrinos," commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra . It was the culmination of a two-year residency that was documented by PBS, and interaction with the Indianapolis Latino community was crucial to the work's creation. A more modest occasion, but significant for the insights it gave into the intimacy and expressive range of Frank's music, was the climax of her residency at the University of Indianapolis Monday night. The concert at the Christen DeHaan Fine Arts Center focused on works for one to three players. Composer Gabriela Lena Frank Frank's greatest achievement is to personalize her deep-seated connections to ethnic musical traditions, particularly those of Latin America, through a sophisticated command of resources associated with classical music. This was especially notable in the one solo piece of hers p...

Comfortable for touring and thus able to meet audiences halfway anywhere it goes, the program the Martha Graham Dance Company brought to Clowes Hall Friday night seemed especially appropriate to renew old acquaintances with fans and to communicate its legacy to newcomers. The Messenger of Death ominously pins Clytemnestra's cape with his staff. The centerpiece was what artistic director Janet Eilber called a "distilled" version of Graham's interpretation of the character of Clytemnestra and the horrific events covered in Aeschylus' "Oresteia" trilogy. With the helpful addition of supertitles, Graham's narrative, focused on the murderous Queen of Mycenae, was communicated concisely. That way, the dancing remained free to focus on the choreography's symbolism and emotional import. Halim El-Dabh's mercurial score, often dissonant and free-floating, seems to tap archaic roots as well, particularly in representing Clytemnestra's scr...

"Twelve" takes its title from the fact that the recording was made in Tel Aviv on 12/12/12. But there is nothing wheel-spinningly repetitive in Eli Degibri 's music-making. The tenor saxophonist has a highly compatible quartet, with teenagers Gadi Lehavi (piano) and Ofri Nehemya (drums) complementing veteran bassist Barak Mori and the bandleader. "Twelve" continues to display the fecundity of Eli Degribi. Plus Loin Music has issued Degribi's first disc since he returned to his native Israel. His compositions are catchy and dare to be melodically forthright. He is capable as a soloist of staying loyal to the simplicity of his melodies but also getting a bit fancy with them, too, as on "New Waltz." To study what he and the band bring to their musical excursions, it might be advisable to focus on the eight-minute excursion through the standard "Autumn in New York." You get the sense that more than chord structure is being kept in min...

My M.O. (A candid revelation in quiet couplets about how to pursue and promulgate a certain kind of poetry, following what could be called the off-the-rack Ferdinand-the-Bull aesthetic.) Hello, there, reader!   I’d like to invite you Into my poetry, which speaks plainly And with a bemused tone of wonder and Appreciation of the natural world As it dances with us in our ordinary lives. This is my inexhaustible modus operandi. It’s a living, of sorts. My poems dependably display Sensitivity and the rewards of paying attention To such things as the minute devotions of a grasshopper, A pond’s stillness, and something cute about waterfowl. Reading my poems is always an invitation For you to be sensitive, too.   I want to say That you can be as sensitive as I am, Though of course I got there first, as the poet Who is so plainly sensitive, and published. But if You read my poetry aloud in gatherings of folks Also honin...

Kurt Vonnegut: A friendly, sidelong glance at love. There's no place like home, fortunately. As an installer of triple-insulated windows and bathroom fixtures (including fancy tub enclosures), John keeps his customers' home life physically secure. But he has no more clues as to securing home psychologically than most of us. So it goes, as the formulaic Kurt Vonnegut verbal shrug has it. John and other inhabitants of North Crawford, Indiana, in the early 1960s don't have many bulwarks against being inundated with doubts, apart from knowing each other well in the kind of small town of which Hoosier legends are made.  That, and the outlet  of the Mask and Wig Club, a community theater company, at whose headquarters "Who Am I This Time? (and Other Conundrums of Love)" takes place. Aaron Posner's adaptation of three Vonnegut short stories sits comfortably on the cast of Indiana Repertory Theatre' s production, which opened this weekend under the direc...

It's little wonder that "An Alpine Symphony" doesn't come up often on symphony orchestra programs. The huge forces Richard Strauss calls for militate against busting the budget to program the 50-minute work. And, frankly, descriptive music so elaborate does not enjoy the greatest prestige among music-lovers. Yet perhaps the huge body of evocative film music composed since the work's premiere in 1915 contributes to "An Alpine Symphony"'s favorable reception on the rare occasions it's performed. Another unspoken obstacle: If you want to worship nature in symphonic music, you've got to be more explicit about the spiritual payoff, as in several symphonies by the composer's contemporary, Gustav Mahler. Strauss (1864-1949) simply applies his genius at orchestration to a day in the Alps, devoid of resonance any larger than one man's encounter with a mountain. But what resonance that is! Krzysztof Urbanski reaches for the summit with ...