Jay Harvey Upstage

The viola d'amore is a special interest of Rachel Barton Pine's. Among the most valuable recent releases from Cedille Reords is a magnificent disc of Antonio Vivaldi's six concertos for viola d'amore, with Rachel Barton Pine as soloist with Ars Antigua . For the most part, the accompaniments are for string orchestra with harpsichord (David Schrader), but a particularly fascinating piece is the Concerto in F major, RV 97, with the resonant string instrument partnered with horns and oboes, plus (in the slow second movement), a bassoon. The viola d'amore, which gave way to the viola we know today, enjoyed a vogue in the Baroque era because its equal number of bowed and resonating strings (totaling 12)  gave it a warm aura as a solo instrument that could hold its own in the ensembles of the day.  And this is how Pine plays it, fully engaged with the Chicago-based period-instrument ensemble. Vivaldi achieved a great deal of variety in his settings for the ins...

Morton Feldman (1926-1987), American composer One exchange from a 1967 interview with Morton Feldman, newly translated from the French and available through a link on Norman Lebrecht's blog: JYB: What do you think about composers who close themselves off in a technique, in a system? MF: That’s like those guys who are forty years old who still live in their mother’s skirts. My tribute:   A haiku in memoriam Morton Feldman Who are they? Just watch For the ones who hike up skirts To cross mud puddles.

 "To speak of culture is to foreshadow a battle." — John Keene, Annotations , quoted by Ben Ehrenreich in the Oct. 19 Nation. "I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their'n." — Huckleberry Finn, reflecting on his companion Jim's homesickness as they raft down the Mississippi What do we go to art for? How vital to our experience of art are the political and cultural values we have absorbed and the personal moral sense we've developed along the way? These questions loom large as our political life shows no sign of losing its polarized quality, and the cultural wars that sometimes overshadow larger social ills continue to bloody the landscape. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" still bobs to the surface of a raging torrent, and a particular instance concerns me here. Without retreating into aestheticism, it's important to resist confusing what art does with how we think the world should be. ...

Garrick Ohlsson is a Chopin specialist, ranges into the modern repertoire, too It won't disappoint fans of Garrick Ohlsson to know that the second half of his recital this Sunday for the American Pianists Association will be devoted to music of Frederic Chopin. That's a considerable understatement, given that Ohlsson has been in the front rank of American concert pianists since winning the Chopin International Piano Competition in 1970, when he was just 21. After his recital's first half comprises two major works by other masters — Beethoven's Sonata in A major, op. 110, and Schubert's "Wanderer" Fantasy in C major — Ohlsson will offer Scherzo No. 4 in E major, two etudes, the Nocturne in C minor, op. 48, no. 1, and the Ballade in G minor. Ohlsson's discography as well as his concert schedule has featured a lot of Chopin throughout the 45 years he's been before the public in a big way. One of my favorites among his early LPs is the 1974 ...

Sammy Miller, in a subdued portrait sans Congregation At the end of its cheekily named Rust Belt tour, Sammy Miller and the Congregation played Birdy's Sunday night to a large, ardent crowd. The New York sextet includes as keyboardist David Linard, formerly active in Indianapolis as a Sophie Faught sideman. Led by an amiable drummer manning a compact kit with a wide range of dynamics and exuberant time-keeping, the band was Rust-Belting it out one last time. According to trombonist Sam Crittenden, the now concluded tour is the band's first-ever venture away from the Big Apple. Sammy Miller and the Congregation update classic jazz and Americana. The latter loose category ranged on this gig from Stephen Foster to Jimmie Davis, whose "You Are My Sunshine" was an assertive encore. Everything they take up seems subject to hardening the groove and freeing the conventional jazz demeanor: The band revives the category of "entertainment jazz," whose lumin...

Nearly 50 years ago, an aide to Robert F. Kennedy told Andrew Kopkind, a leading journalist of the time: "One of the questions we ask is what the political consequences of a speech will be. But it is very rarely the first question." The first question on the minds of RFK and his circle on the night of April 4, 1968, cannot adequately be framed. Whatever it was, the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination answered it superbly. Perhaps a version of that question is answered in James Still's new play. What Kennedy said in just over five minutes in that crowded park at 17th and Broadway has gone into history as balm to a deep wound — balm that was effective notably here in Indianapolis, if not elsewhere across a nation boiling up in black rage at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Whatever the speech's political consequences might have been in the short run, they were snuffed out with the New York senator's assassination two months later. ...

Anyone preparing to see "Titus Andronicus" on the stage does not get much encouragement from commentators on Shakespeare. My favorite among modern Bard critics, the generous and judicious Harold Goddard, opens his two-page essay (in "The Meaning of Shakespeare") with this tight-lipped sentence: "All lovers of Shakespeare would be glad to relieve the poet of responsibility for that concentrated brew of blood and horror, Titus Andronicus ." Wishful thinking is not enough to absolve Shakespeare of a pretty certain claim to sole authorship of this revenge tragedy, set in late ancient Rome at a time when the decaying empire was being menaced by the Goths. The thin line between civilization and barbarism was never thinner than it is here. EclecticPond Theatre Company has mounted a gritty, robust interpretation of a drama with an excess of mayhem and unalloyed evil designs.  It has been supposed that the burgeoning author was attempting a gruesome parody of...

In the head-spinning rapid pace of life today, it's stunning that people still talk about "the foreseeable future." What kind of genius does it take to know how much of the future is foreseeable, especially when — as has been pointed out recently about "Back to the Future" Day — no predictions of just a few decades ago foresaw the Internet? "The Nether," the 2013 play by Jennifer Haley that opened at the Phoenix Theatre Thursday night, "takes place in the near future," the program book tells us. It's a canny positioning of the drama's placement in time. It prepares the audience for seeing so much of the present worming its way into a technological dystopia that Haley's startling manipulations of character and setting seem plausible. The putative nearness of this particular future is frightening. We are already on the threshold of establishing second and third selves online, depending on how much we choose to engage with what i...

Barnabas Kelemen seemed fully formed as a musician when he won the top prize in the 2002 Internataional Violin Competition of Indianapolis . There was more than the steely confidence and technical polish of a competition winner to his playing — a quality more settled, more mature, more ready for the world than even a few other IVCI gold medalists I can recall. Laszlo Fenjo, Katalin Kokas, Barnabas Kelemen, and Gabor Homoky. So it's not surprising that he should have put together five years ago a string quartet that has quickly gained acclaim and stature among the younger such groups on the international scene. On Tuesday night the Kelemen Quartet appeared at Indiana Landmarks Center under the joint auspices of the Ensemble Music Society and the IVCI. The program drew heavily on the Hungarian origin of the ensemble, after opening with a late quartet by Joseph Haydn. For that piece, Kelemen's wife, Katalin Kokas, played second violin; for pieces by Gyorgy Kurtag and B...

My view, first set, left to right: Ballantine, Dokken, Ortwein, Hetrick and Finnigan. Band names that carry clues as to size, genre, and personnel can be almost cryptic. Nonetheless, the new HetWein Futet stands in the firm, if odd, tradition of naming push-comes-to-shove. Let's see: There's been drummer Ralph Peterson's Fo'tet, saxophonist Jeff Coffin's Mu'tet, and of course (to trowel in size references beyond single digits) the 10-piece Marty Paich Dektette that provided such a good setting for Mel Torme for many years. Classical education having survived better in Europe, French pianist Martial Solal counted up to 12 in Greek, while replacing the last part of the compound, with his Dodecaband. Combined leader names work if they are short, as in TanaReid, an ensemble that played the Jazz Kitchen a few times under the leadership of drummer Akira Tana and bassist Rufus Reid. Five syllables required for the much-admired Sauter-Finnegan band of a couple...

The Bad Plus blazed new trails in the genre of the jazz piano trio. Despite fundamental contributions of bassists and drummers to many great ensembles over the years, the focus had always tended to be on the pianist. Similarly, if you put a high-profile horn into the mix, the tendency was to see it as the So-and-So Quartet, with So-and-So being a significant saxophone or trumpet player. Touring virtuosos playing with local rhythm sections reinforced that image. Brother act: Iverson, Redman, Anderson, and King. It's not surprising that Joshua Redman's association with the Bad Plus has resulted in a redefinition of this kind of quartet. In its appearance Sunday evening at the Palladium, the supergroup displayed its sturdiness resting equally on four supports — each of which has a distinct identity that's reliably blended into an ensemble presentation. Bassist Reid Anderson delivered laid-back program commentary and, near the end, an improvised song resting upon his ...

In "Remembrances," Brian Honigbaum wanted to bring together his lifelong involvement in dance and his Jewish heritage, focusing on its greatest existential threat, the Holocaust. Caitlin Negron and Timothy June play daughter and father in "Remembrances" The result makes "Remembrances" both personal and universal. The work is the centerpiece of this weekend's Dance Kaleidoscope program, which is being performed at Clowes Hall to accommodate interest that goes beyond DK's regular audience. Honigbaum, long a resident of Texas, began his dance training at Butler, and his professional experience included a brief stint with DK. The focus on a single family as representative of the millions of Jewish victims of Nazi racial ideology links together the variety of harrowing episodes Honigbaum singles out. The envelope of sound design gives further context, consisting of excerpts from Holocaust survivor interviews, plus music by Leonard Bernstein and ...

One full-length traversal of this weekend's Classical Series program by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra was not enough, but a schedule that has to make way for accompanying "Back to the Future" next Wednesday probably had something to do with the curtailment. There was much that was wholly satisfying — beyond guest conductor Michael Francis' compact, enthralling oral program note from the podium — in the journey from Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" through the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto to Elgar's "Enigma" Variations. But Friday night was your only chance to make the trip with the ISO. Francis is newly installed as conductor of the Florida Orchestra, and radiates the unassuming gregariousness easily associated with both his British origin and the laidback ambiance of Tampa Bay, where he's now settled with his wife and their infant daughter. He proved adept as an accompanist, guiding the ISO smartly in support...

Bohemian rhapsodies: ATOS Trio played a Czech program. The three musicians who got together in 2003 to form the ensemble that played Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center took care of the naming problem by going the all-caps route. How the ATOS Trio boosted its American profile offers a key to the solution they found: The 2007 Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award allowed Annette von Hehn, Stefan Heinemeyer, and Thomas Hoppe to play 20 U.S. concerts, including Carnegie Hall. The group honored in the award's name has the mouth-filling identification of its members, two of whom — husband and wife Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson — were for several years on the IU Jacobs School of Music faculty. Often abbreviated to K-L-R, that trio didn't have the advantage of the shortest last names of any possible piano trio, the Ax-Kim-Ma ensemble, nor the difficult choice of finding an appropriate name that didn't rely on members' surnames, as the se...

"Behold, all flesh is as the grass" — musical flesh, too. I keep seeing these ugly photos of unrecognizable famous people at the foot of some articles online. Who is this woman? I think as I stare at her grotesque features. And it usually is a woman, with wrinkles like W.H. Auden,  swollen lips, discolored skin, strawlike or matted hair, eyes like cavernous dark pools. Sometimes all facial features are pulled back toward the ears as if under the impact of G forces. Clicking on the lines underneath the photo, which run something like "17  Celebrities Who Aged Horribly" or "10 Celebrities Who Ruined Themselves With Plastic Surgery," doesn't tempt me. Whole galleries of horrors are promised. I pass them by; I find enough to revolt me nowadays in the political sphere. Yet opening these galleries must interest a lot of people, or I wouldn't keep running across such creep-fests tied with other sideshow items, like cans to a dog's tail, to i...

The air of celebration was bright at the Schrott Center Sunday afternoon, despite the shadow over the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra concert due to the recent death of longtime hornist Kent Leslie, to whose memory the concert was dedicated. ICO music director Matthew Kraemer The celebratory air was immediately established as new music director Matthew Kraemer mounted the podium to lead the 31-year-old orchestra in Maurice Ravel's arrangement of Claude Debussy's "Danse (Tarantelle Styrienne)." It established the dance theme of the ICO's first concert of the 2015-16 season. In the second half, which a previous engagement didn't allow me to hear, the theme was reinforced by performances of Dvorakk's Czech Suite, op. 39, and Ligeti's "Concerto Romanesc" (Romanian Concerto). The remainder of the first half — after the Debussy/Ravel had set the upbeat mood and showed off the ICO's nicely honed ensemble sound in the hall's fine acou...

Straight-shooter Nick earns Jay Gatsby's trust. The click-clack of Nick Carraway's Underwood typewriter makes the final sounds after he has spoken some of the most marvelous words ever set down on an American novel's last page. Projected onto the rear of a darkened stage, the typed letters slowly form the words: "The Great Gatsby." It's the right final touch in Simon Levy's adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, Indiana Repertory Theatre' s season-opening production. Presented in this way, the title puts a seal on Nick's narrative, as if the upright young man's perception of Jay Gatsby could be summed up in a sudden inspiration and that any question of what greatness really is for Americans is best represented in a one-word highball  mixing irony and genuine tribute. Zach Kenney's forthright portrayal of Carraway — a hearty, circumspect, devoted narrator of Gatsby's mystery and undeniable stature — was winning from the ...