Jay Harvey Upstage

A week ago, the cameo self-portraits of five young pianists were topped by the contribution of Esteban Esteban Castro, 20, channels both Prokofiev and James P. Johnson. Castro. The free concert in the Madame Walker Theater Sept. 18 yielded the most promising performance in the work of the youngest contestant, as the American Pianists Association presented its five finalists for the Cole Porter Fellowship in Jazz. A New Jerseyite, now a New Yorker studying at the Juilliard School, and with a firm grounding in classical music,  Castro treated his trio mates well inaugurating the Premiere Series of trio sets Saturday night. Yet he chose to devote a large proportion of his 70-minute second set at the Jazz Kitchen to expansive, unaccompanied playing. Often the trio would rejoin him by simply sliding into place, as if the three had been working together for a long time. That effect can be credited in large part to the skillful collegiality of bassist Nick Tucker and drummer Kenny Phel...

 You would never run into the sort of concerts that are winding up the 2022 I nternational Violin Competition of Indianapolis in "real concert life." Three hefty concertos for a solo instrument and orchestra do not constitute the kind of program that's normally scheduled.  That's quite all right — it's a contest, with a certain expansiveness and a lot of concentrated work. Besides the three finalists I heard Friday night, of course, the work fell on the shoulders of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor Leonard Slatkin. So even if the preliminary and semifinal rounds bore more resemblance to the kind of spotlight Minami Yoshida of Japan played the Sibelius. performance with a focus on one performer — we call them "recitals" — it's the four nights of finals that bring the stress and  inevitable comparisons to the fore.  There were two nights of Classical Finals (the word "classical" in its formal designation of the late 18...

 It's clear from his birth records and the way he wrote his name in any serious context that Wolfgang Amadé Mozart's middle name was not "Amadeus." Yet a sturdy tradition with that Latin version was given modern multigenre confirmation by Peter Shaffer's play and the movie starring a cackling Tom Hulce. The "Amadeus" image holds as well in the divided nature attributed to the great composer by what Shaffer imagines to have been the view of his older contemporary Antonio Salieri, who wondered that the vulgar, immature prodigy he knew seemed also divinely gifted. The court composer, who eventually went mad, questioned God's justice in pouring fine wine into such an unworthy vessel.  Without over-stressing the point, music-lovers and violinists have seen both the otherworldly elegance and the rambunctious adolescence in the Austrian genius' five violin concertos, written in 1776 when he was 19. In the 11th quadrennial International Violin Competitio...

With the finalists announced below, as the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis pauses to allow for the initiation of four nights of concerto performances that constitute the final stage, I pause to take stock of what I heard in the semi-final round (September 16-19), where my attendance (via live stream) was more sporadic than I wished. Let's concentrate on the best performances I heard of John Harbison's "Incontro," the commissioned work for the current competition. Performances that were sensitive to the true duo nature of the work impressed me; a few I heard (not by finalists) seemed to assume the music was all about the violin. Joshua Brown had strong statements to make throughout both phases thus far. After the piano's  separately designed solo arpeggios (pedaled so as to suggest mystery, as they were here), Joshua Brown projected the lyrical violin line with long, well-supported phrases. The middle section sounded deliberately tentative, thus ma...

Finalists for 2023 awards take curtain call at Walker.   Jazz in Indianapolis sends shafts of recognition further into the world each time the American Pianists Association focuses its attention on jazz piano as played by five young people seeking special distinction here. So it's appropriate to remember that the hub from which Indianapolis jazz has radiated light and heat for decades was the fabled nightlife along Indiana Avenue in the post-war era. Based at the center of black life here and a lone surviving monument of the neighborhood's prosperity and cultural identity is the Madame C.J. Walker Legacy Center , where the finalists for the 2023 American Pianist Awards were introduced to the community Sunday in a free concert. It remains to find out how much the tantalizing snippets of the five young men's talents will be fruitfully expanded in performances in  the Premiere Series, which  opens Saturday at the Jazz Kitchen. Esteban Castro, the youngest finalist at just 2...

Sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood bond over music. With his spiritual eyes trained on the Oversoul, Ralph Waldo Emerson couldn't find much of value in the work of Jane Austen:"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate," he confided to his diary in 1861, going on to explain that Austen novels  "seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow." A scattershot critique, to be sure, with some home truths from the Sage of Concord's perspective: nothing of the transcendentalist can be found in Austen's fiction. Its focused realism, with judicious use of coincidence,  is germane to the development of the English novel.  A work like "Sense and Sensibility" unsurprisingly adapts well to the stage, which remains hospitable to stories told close to the bone of eve...

Pressed by family issues to  settle for spot coverage of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis ' preliminary phase, I will highlight some of the salient points in the recitals I heard on the live stream, from Sunday morning into Tuesday morning.  The 37 participants who remain on the schedule from the registration total of 39 will each have completed their presentations by early Wednesday evening. Thursday will be a day to reflect on the jury's choice of 16 semifinalists, and to prepare for the next phase, which comprises their more substantial recital performances starting Friday. What a wealth of good Bach playing I heard, often the participant's choice to open with! Movements from the foundational 18th-century master's unaccompanied repertoire for violin — three sonatas and three partitas — provide a baroque field of dreams for adept fiddlers.  There were competition years when the Bach elephant in the room — the Chaconne from Partita no. 2 in D minor ...

Charlie Ballantine flanked by Jesse Wittman and Cassius Goens  III Small wonder that Charlie Ballantine evokes his early memories of music at the Jazz Kitchen by recalling being allowed to listen to the likes of John Scofield and Dave Stryker as a burgeoning jazz guitarist.  He was still in his early teens, he told a large audience Saturday night, and his attendance even in the doorway of a nightclub serving alcohol involved a little winking at the law. In one of the few interruptions of the music the guitarist allowed himself in his trio's first set, Ballantine assessed these slightly sneaky visits as formative in his musical direction and career decisions. His voice broke slightly in reminiscence. The guitarist's music has had a rootsy feeling for many years, and his geographical roots in central Indiana also are vital.  The first time I heard him as a bandleader brought me up close to what still seems fundamental in his playing, even though he has grown into casting hi...

Collaborators pause while reading the final part of a contentious magazine piece. Choices about writing authoritatively can resemble Russian nesting dolls. There's always more you can explore, and the most plainly stated sentence may suggest further questions as ambiguity pokes out in unexpected places. Where do those decorative, serially contained dolls of fact get down to infinitesimal size? Is the truth down there or closer to the surface, and is the surface more important? In writing about a play based on a book you haven't read, and learning from the printed program that two fiercely incompatible characters in the three-character "The Lifespan of a Fact" wrote a book together on which the play is based, you might have to make the old computer-based WYSIWYG decision. The American Lives Theatre production before me Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre must be considered the ground floor of a story on which this review has to rest. I am not going to ascend the skys...