Jay Harvey Upstage

Since 1994, Jaime Laredo, who as a teenager studied with Josef Gingold at Indiana University, has presided over the jury of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, which Gingold founded. Laredo also has had a firm connection with the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he studied with Ivan Galamian and later served on the faculty. In that capacity, one of his students was Jennifer Koh, now well-launched upon a splendid career that embraces advocacy of new music. Together, on a new Cedille Records release titled "Two x Four," the violinists offer an attractive program of music for strings that highlight two violin soloists. The disc opens with a fleet, engaging account of "the Bach Double," as J.S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor is familiarly known. Coordination with the accompanying orchestra — the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble, conducted by Vinay Parameswaran,  is tidy and animated. I'm impressed with the unity of expressio...

Most of the songs presented in the annual Great American Songbook High School Vocal Academy and Competition are older than I am. The participants who interpret them are young enough to be my grandchildren. So I have this enviable middle position each year, looking both to the future and to the past. In Friday's conclusive competition at the Palladium, I found most of the youthful vocalists astonishingly mature in their appearance and interpretations. That middle position was thus reinforced more than ever — a happy place to be. This blog post won't attempt to review pluses and minuses about the performances of 24 songs, two by each of the 12 finalists brought to Carmel for the  past week to go through master classes, workshops and rehearsals on the way to Friday's finale. Though I wasn't attempting to pick a favorite during the lengthy program, I tweeted some impressions during intermission and a few afterward. Of the 2014 Songbook Ambassador — the competition...

The wedding celebration in the first act of "Madama Butterfly" "Madama Butterfly" may be the most intense and protracted of Giacomo Puccini's operatic studies of women as victims. It's got the musical quality needed to support a lengthy unfolding of the title character's tragedy: a teenager in pre-modern Japan casting all her hopes of a better life upon an arranged marriage with an American naval officer. There was an admirable gravity and patience with the inevitable gathering of doom in the second act, superbly coordinated by conductor Ramon Tebar and stage director Marc Verzatt. The dramatic irony of Butterfly's darkening fate after a faithful nightlong vigil leading to a beautiful dawn was gorgeously realized in Cincinnati Opera's production, which opened at Music Hall on Thursday night. But as lovers of "Madama Butterfly" well know, even as they are once again drawn into the story, Cio-Cio-San (as she is known in her nativ...

In its sixth year, the summer Shakespeare production presented by Heartland Actors Repertory Theatre will make a point of bridging the White River State Park reality with the enchanted-island fantasy of "The Tempest." Familiar to IRT audiences, Robert Neal is HART's Prospero. "There will be a different look to this production," promises HART producing artistic director Diane Timmerman. "It will bring us into this world — the park is the setting, and also the island" ruled by the main character, the wizard Prospero, played by Robert Neal. The selection of "The Tempest," the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own, only five years before his death in 1616, is an obvious milestone in the most illustrious career in world theater. Timmerman said HART chose it also for its "magical, all-encompassing" quality in observance of the 450th anniversary of the poet-playwright's birth. Its presentation July 31 (preview) and Aug. 1 an...

In "Miles and Ellie," Don Zolidis draws on his experience as a schoolteacher to set up a bizarre "meet cute" scenario for the young lovers of the title. A couple of 17-year-olds are carrying out a school  assignment to play a married couple negotiating infant care and other woes of early marriage. What could possibly go wrong, right? High-schoolers Ellie and Miles regard their assigned 'baby.' The Phoenix Theatre production is in its second week on the Basile Stage, the cozy underground site of the company's more intimate shows, though production values there are full-fledged and departures from realistic style can seem quite at home. In "Miles and Ellie," home is where the wounded hearts are, a place where Ellie's can be relentlessly tenderized by her older sister's pounding. Ilyana is a brassy, insulting cheerleader whose popularity at school is substantially based on manipulative promiscuity. The insecure and secretly envio...

Opera's origins among Italian aristocrats couldn't long keep the new art form from making its way with the general public. Among the early output in the post-courtly genre are the 30-odd operas of Francesco Cavalli, whose "La Calisto" opened Thursday night in Corbett Theater at Cincinnati's School for Creative and Performing Arts. First performed  in Venice in 1651, "La Calisto"has been best known in modern times via Raymond Leppard's "realization." Some thickening of orchestral texture and other inauthentic touches generated sharp criticism of Leppard's work and may have helped prod his departure from his native England, much to the eventual benefit of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra . Nathalie Paulin portrays a nymph victimized by godly lust. Not being prepared to assess the musicological niceties connected with staging a centuries-old work, I  need to cite the context provided by Richard Taruskin in his "Oxford Histo...

Lorin Maazel left a strong legacy with several orchestras. I never had the experience of attending a concert Lorin Maazel conducted, but my record collection includes some outstanding performances under his baton, two of which I want to loft kudos for here. Maazel, a child-prodigy conductor with a restless adult career in several of the world's major music capitals, died Sunday at his Virginia estate, age 84. Both of the favorites in my collection were recorded with the Cleveland Orchestra, of which Maazel was music director between 1972 and 1982. In the album of the nine Beethoven symphonies (Columbia), Maazel and the Clevelanders play No. 2 in B-flat about as well as I've ever heard it. I'm struck by his evidently high comfort level with the work's oddities, some of them harmonic, a few of them formal. The slow introduction to the first movement and the outsize codas to that movement and to the finale are beautifully handled. The slow movement, Larghetto, fe...

Pacifica Quartet is in residence at IU. Dmitri Shostakovich's music often has commentators overworking their favorite dark adjectives, because the experience of hearing his scores plays upon the emotions so intensely. Metaphors of submission and resistance vie for supremacy as the works are weighed against the composer's lifelong strife with the Soviet regime. It was no different for me Monday night in Indiana University's Auer Hall, when the Pacifica Quartet played two of the Shostakovich string quartets that they have recently staked a well-received claim to in a Cedille Records series called "The Soviet Experience." The performance of Quartets Nos. 2 and 9 (A major, op. 68, and E-flat major, op. 117, respectively) had all the high-profile anxiety, pathos and slightly desperate cheer characteristic of the Soviet Union's most durable composer. The second quartet opened the program, with some extraneous anxiety and irritation provided by the buzz and ...

The Tudor king Henry, the eighth of that name to occupy the English throne and the most influential serial monogamist in English history, wrote music, collected instruments and patronized musicians. The Peabody Consort, with director Mark Cudek (center). His in-laws, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, likewise are figures of cultural importance — both as models (admired by Machiavelli) of monarchical power and as contributors to the woes of Jewish diaspora. Examples of 16th-century courtly connections to music embraced by Henry's wide circle made up the next-to-last program of this year's Indianapolis Early Music Festival on Friday night at the Indiana History Center. Artistic director Mark Cudek's Peabody Consort presented music of the era, interspersed by dramatic readings about music, monarchy and Jewish exile engagingly recited by Robert Aubry Davis. When Davis said: "Mark, the music," to end his first verbal selection, he wasn't just ...

Nikolaus and Anna throw themselves on the mercy of French officer Audebert (left). Centennial observances of the start of the First World War can bring us a little closer to understanding that conflict's epochal significance. Given superior artistic form, as in the 2011 opera "Silent Night" by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell, the way life changed forever in the West between 1914 and 1918 hits close to home. The opera's focus, powerfully realized in the Cincinnati Opera production, is the informal 1914 Christmas Eve truce among small groups of combatants on the Western front. It actually happened, several months after dithering among Europe's great powers had given militarized nationalism its head. What with their slow, mixed-signals response to the June 28 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the inevitable result was general war. The opera frontloads the horrors of the most destructive warfare known anywhere up to that point. With dissonant roaring...

As a theater director, Bob Harbin has evinced a knack for mounting big, intricate ensemble productions that manage a wide embrace without getting sloppy about it. "Hair," the epochal "American tribal love-rock musical," is the latest in a Harbin series whose immediate predecessor, 2013's "Spamalot," will be fondly remembered by many. The site is once again the cozy, cavernous Athenaeum Theater on Michigan Street downtown. In a building with links to iconoclasm (insofar as Kurt Vonnegut's grandfather was its architect), the BOBDIREX production overcame the limitations of a period piece, despite its classic status, and found new ways to be fresh. Harbin's large, energetic, multiracial cast — choreographed to a fare-thee-well by Kenny Shepard and well-prepared musically by Trevor Fanning, who also leads the onstage Mass Ave Electric Sunflower Band — got just about everything right. On a starry, hard-to-describe (but not nondescript) set by ...