Jay Harvey Upstage

When Gary Varvel's regular cartoon feature in The Indianapolis Star depicted his response to President Obama's executive order on immigration , I was farther away in this hemisphere than I've ever been: Argentina. a Cropping focuses on the cartoon's controversial elements; a Norman Rockwell inspired grandma (gray hair in a bun, etc.) is not shown here, but the multigenerational whiteness of the family strikes a familiar chord. It was a good place to confirm my perspective on the historic establishment and movement of cultures in North and South America. The takeaway message for this monolingual WASP: Rule, Hispania! Western Hemisphere history is overwhelmingly the result of conquest directed from the Iberian peninsula long before the first permanent settlements by the Northern Europeans whose descendants are about to begin their Thanksgiving feast in Varvel's cartoon. The midsized inland city — San Juan — where my wife and I were visiting our son was founded ...

What a kerfuffle I got into when I objected to the interruption of a St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert by demonstrators protesting the police shooting of Michael Brown ! It was especially galling to some on Facebook that I posted my change of mind about the incident a day after saying it was an honor for the orchestra to be deemed relevant enough in today's world to attract protesters. The much-dreaded rioting in the streets that marked the aftermath of the fatal August incident recurred spectacularly last night after a grand jury determined there were insufficient grounds for indicting the Ferguson police officer who killed Brown. Police and protesters act out their roles in the aftermath of the grand jury's decision.. Now, in response to that mass lawlessness,  I'm ready to suggest that the SLSO be proactive in reaching out in good will to the community, specifically inviting the demonstrators back to Powell Hall with the hope that this time they will stay to l...

Back blogging after a two-week hiatus, I want to convey my impressions of the music I heard in Argentina — not so much as a critic of performances but of the places where performances happen. Mozart Requiem rehearsal with local choir (supplemented only at final rehearsal by singers from Buenos Aires). Specifically, I set down this paean to the Juan Victoria Auditorium in San Juan, Argentina, where I heard,  in addition to an abundance of student performances, two concerts by the Symphony Orchestra of the National University of San Juan. My wife, Susan Raccoli, and I were visiting at the invitation of our younger son, William Harvey , concertmaster since last spring of that orchestra and violin teacher at the university. Soprano sang arias by Gounod and Bellini. I was thoroughly charmed by the acoustic environment of the concerts, a week apart (Nov. 14 and 21). I found it hard to stay away from rehearsals for the second program, which comprised Mozart's Requiem and thre...

At this late date, it may seem like the crudest kind of piling on to add my tongue-clucking voice to the extensive critical commentary on Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's stage appearances and musical interpretations. The American violinist has been before the public since she was barely out of her teens, and she is now 53. Only a hard heart could be totally unsympathetic to her, ever since the kitchen accident she sustained as a rising star that sidelined her career and threw her into suicidal depression years ago. Still, we are left with what to make of the kind of impression she made Friday night at the Palladium in a guest appearance with the touring Moscow State Symphony Orchestra . An artist's having surmounted personal struggles can never be the whole story. The main focus has to Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg: A diary approach to Bruch be on what the artist delivers in one particular performance after another. What Salerno-Sonnenberg presented as soloist in Max Bruch...

Claude Arpeggio knew that a musical career in the mid-21st century required a lot of image upkeep. From Claude Arpeggio's hands, nothing but brilliance. It became the main focus of his life, and in the late digital age, it often seemed like a losing battle. An image of brilliance — matching his own frank concept of himself as an artist — had to be secured. Extensive training, constant practice, and what he flattered himself was artistic insight could take a concert pianist only so far. If any nay-saying showed up in an online search for "Claude Arpeggio," there was no telling how much damage it might do. The possibilities ate away at Arpeggio. He could look back on the precedent several decades earlier when a pianist named Dejan Lazic used the European Union's assertion of "a right to be forgotten" as justification for asking the Washington Post to take down a less than enraptured review of his recital.  The floodgates of image control had opened s...

Trumpeter Avishai Cohen 's cogent trio with bassist Omer Avital and drummer Nasheet Waits has just brought into the public square "Dark Nights" ( Anzic Records) .  Trio Triveni chooses to offer quizzical invitations into a type of ensemble that has a hard time justifying the full investment of a listener's time and attention. What is this odd trio's 3rd CD all about? The rather dour flash and gaudy introspection of the first several pieces on "Dark Nights" failed to engage me.  Eventually, I admired the teasing hurry-up-and-wait push-pull of a Cohen original, "The OC." I needed something more than a blues-saturated nod to Charles Mingus represented by "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" to be convinced of what Trio Triveni can do when they aren't putting their best foot forward on the leader's compositions. Fortunately, Frank Foster's "Shiny Stockings" did it for me.  It is an oblique interpretation of a tune better ...

Brooklyn Rider: They got whole worlds in their hands. Having taken its name from an early- 20th-century movement inspired by artistic cross-fertilization, Brooklyn Rider has made an album out of a series of new works inspired by a wide variety of artists. The expressionist "Blue Rider" group brought a fruitful interdisciplinary vigor to the pioneering work of Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky in the early 1900s. The string quartet Brooklyn Rider has used its extensive network of champions and collaborators to assemble 13 new works in which the chosen composers salute artists they regard as inspirational, ranging from James Brown to Igor Stravinsky, Chick Corea to John Steinbeck. In the 21st century, confidence about the future domination of any given artistic tendency is probably misplaced. As shown by these works, stylistic diversity is now cutting-edge. Across the wide variety represented in "Brooklyn Rider Almanac" ( Mercury Classics ), the only di...

Center Grove High School will be the lucky site of the next "317 Series" concert by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra , thanks to the knack for Mozart displayed by guest artists Augustin Hadelich and Nicholas McGegan Friday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Both the violinist and the conductor have appeared with the ISO before, but Friday's concert was the  Nicholas McGegan brought out ISO's Mozart potential. only full-length all-Mozart program starring them at the orchestra's downtown Indianapolis home. The customary Saturday-night classical follow-up is being skipped to accommodate the new run-out series' "Greater Greenwood Program One" Sunday afternoon. (Spillover Halloween chills are on tap tonight at the Hilbert as the ISO accompanies the movie "Psycho.") To focus on the batonless conductor first: something magical happened throughout the concert's second half. One of Mozart's great symphonies, composed in haste 231 ...