Jay Harvey Upstage

 A capacity audience at Schrott Center for the Arts Saturday night got  to see the fullest expression yet of Joshua Thompson 's status as "Creative Partner" of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. Joshua Thompson curated and played piano. The manifestation carried the promising title of "Black Keys: The Evolution of the Black Classical Arts." Lest there be any underestimation of the seriousness with which the word "evolution" was taken, the bulk of the program following intermission opened with stunning visual imagery evoking the development of the universe from the Big Bang on into the appearance of human beings in Africa. Thompson's recorded narrative sketched in the difficulty people of African descent have had historically in having an accepted place in composed music of a cultivated kind intended for re-creation in the concert hall: "classical," to use a term that in itself often seems a barrier. The scope of  Thompson's vision wa

Seymour mulls over Andrey II's growing demands. "Little Shop of Horrors" offers  the first soup-to-nuts helping of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, later to become the most definitive movie-songwriting team since the Sherman brothers .  As a stage show, it's  also deserving of a  splashy technical elan from any theater company with the right resources and skills to create the show's bete noire, Audrey II. That's the bloodthirsty exotic plant that lifts Seymour, a lowly plant-shop employee and botanical nerd (Dominique Lawson), to unimaginable success at great moral and ultimately physical cost.  Friday night's audience filled Indiana Repertory Theatre to capacity as the company ended its 2023-24 season. The cast, amplified vocally and presenting itself unambiguously embedded in the characters, drew repeated whoops and hollers in addition to more conventional applause.  Czerton Lim's set design signals the wry turn the show takes immediately in depictin

Takacs Quartet (from left): Andras Fejer, Harumi Rhodes, Richard O'Neill, Edward Dusinberre Separated by an eventful decade, the two appearances here by the Takacs Quartet in the Ensemble Music Societ  series reflect the age's tumult. In 2014, the ensemble's own Hungarian legacy was front and center in the presentation of three quartets by Bela Bartok . On Wednesday evening at Indiana History Center. the group, which now has just one original member, reflected its recent partnership with Julien Labro , a bandoneon virtuoso of distinction. The program showed off the Takacs' outreach as collaborators.  Julien Labro, bandoneonist Not only that, the opening and closing works on the concert grew out of their composers' explicit responses to the pandemic: Bryce Dessner's "Circles" had the churning anxiety about connections suggested by its title; Clarice Assad's "Clash" brought to the fore the harsher realities of a world of lost connections

The Palladium is a worthy site for a wealth of music, and Saturday night it seemed the ideal place for the David Commanday, maestro likely to advance CSO. Carmel Symphony Orchestra, a mass choir and four vocal soloists to present the highly charged religious drama of Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem." With its lavish updating of Palladian architecture, the retrospective splendor of this pride of the Center for the Performing Arts accommodated every musical and visionary twist and turn of the masterpiece under the baton of the CSO's recently appointed music director, David Commanday.  In the initial outburst of "Dies Irae" (Day of Wrath), the lighting on the rear stage wall turned red. The effect made a repeat appearance when that music returned in the last movement, "Libera me." The subsiding to blue for many of the moments of appeal was wholly in order, enhancing the emotional weight of the score, and the lighting effects fortunately weren't over

 Drummers as leaders of small groups tend to provoke questions of nearly psychoanalytical daring. How is Ari Hoenig casts a broad vision.  their traditional job of support for bandmates changed by imposing their musical signature as the boss? Are they showoffs or servant-leaders? Are they keeping something hidden, even repressed, in order to bring out aspects of their musicianship that they find more important when they're in charge? On Friday evening, I was glad to catch up with the influential drummer Ari Hoenig at the Jazz Kitchen after knowing his work only through 20-year-old trio CDs by the French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc.    On the basis of these two recordings, I was impressed by how well he keeps up with the quirky pianist (in partnership with bassist Francois Moutin) and became convinced his playing is more than ordinarily responsive to what collegial tune and harmony specialists (bass and piano) are up to. He finds the thread of melody within primarily rhythmic functi

Fringe vs. history: Juxtaposed farewell waves from Titanic My fading memories of the megahit "Titanic" focus mainly on two things: the front-to-back embrace of lovers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and the horrific wonder of passengers viewed at a distance sliding down the steeply tilted deck into the icy Atlantic waters. I don't know why the romantic story and the theme of class conflict disappeared in my mind, but it was recalled for me with zestful mockery in "The Ship of Dreams" Thursday at IndyFringe's Indy Eleven intimate stage. The vigorous one-act send-up of James Cameron's  1997 film builds upon the young theater company Working Class Socialite 's Fringe Festival production from 2022. The show will run through April 21. The production's style privileges even faulty recall. But it will most likely appeal to playgoers just sentimental and knowledgeable enough about the movie to appreciate revisiting it with a jaundiced eye.

The front line was exceptional in Sunday's Hubbard tribute.  Three trumpeters in the front line — contemporary masters as they are — might have promised an excess of blasting. Fortunately, in Sunday's second set at the Jazz Kitchen, Pharez Whitted, Derrick Gardner, and John Raymond saved the onslaught for the climactic choruses of "Byrdlike," Freddie Hubbard's tribute to a slightly older trumpet master, Donald Byrd. The spectacle closed out the Kitchen's 30th-anniversary week. It was a tribute to Hubbard, deceased but musically immortal Indianapolis icon on his 86th birthday. It was easy to be grateful for signs of restraint in the performance, which more than adequately captured the quality that establishment trumpeter Wynton Marsalis noted as most characteristic upon Hubbard's passing in 2008: exuberance. The brassmen lined up for this tribute fortunately had innate good taste to add to the exuberance. In one of Whitted's solos, for instance, he star

Not many people agree with modernist icon Pierre Boulez's assessment of Tchaikovsky's music: "an abomination," he called it. Decades ago, I was astonished to see the Russian master not included in Donald J. Grout's category of major composers in an early edition of "A History of Western Music," which enjoyed high status as a textbook in the late 20th century. I can easily get my fill of Tchaikovsky, but I'm not among the debunkers. I think his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor stands tall among masterpieces, and it deserves its admired place in public esteem. Surely any history of music should take popularity into account when it comes to assessing a composer's status. Van Cliburn's recording in 1958 cemented the Texan's position as the worthy winner of the Tchaikovsky Su-Han Yang is the ISO's assistant conductor. Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. It went platinum, meaning more than 1 million copies were sold

A salute to Ferruccio Busoni on his death centenary rubbed shoulders with Beethoven's last violin-piano sonata Tuesday night when Liviu Prunaru came back to the scene of his 1998 silver-medal triumph in the International  Violin Competition of Indianapolis . Secure musical partnership: Liviu Prunaru and Chih-Yi Chen The Romanian violinist, who has crowned his career of solo engagements around the world with the concertmastership of the Concertgebouw Orchestra , offered major works by those trailblazing figures in the IVCI's Laureate Series, with Chih-Yi Chen at the piano, at the Indiana History Center. The program was filled out by two lighter pieces, Saint-Saens' "Havanaise," the most popular artistic representation of the habanera dance form outside the one the title character sings in Bizet's "Carmen," and Antonio Bazzini's virtuosic showpiece "Calabrese." (That might have to take second place in pizazz to his "Dance of the G

 All sorts of jazz statements can be folded within the contemporary big band, and composer-pianist Neal Neal Kirkwood shows zest for personalizing big-band sound. Kirkwood displays much of the variety of texture, tempo, structure and expanse possible in this veteran musician's first big-band album. "Night City" ( BJU Records)   The new disc brings together compositions he's written for large ensembles over several decades. His sense of jazz history, with some evident roots in Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, is of a high order, as is his penchant for borderline "classical" orchestration and tone poems such as "The Light of Birds," which concludes the disc. Of the several long cuts, I was struck by his evocation of urban sensory overload in the title track, which evokes a couple of firends meandering together around the city. The surface randomness turns out to be tightly constructed, with bits and pieces sensitively juxtaposed.  But my favorite was &

  "Charlie Parker's Yardbird" has moved around the country since its premiere in 2015 in Philadelphia. Last night it was time for the opera to make a one-night stand in Indianapolis, the hometown of star soprano Angela Brown, who has made a specialty of the role of Addie, the musician's mother. The Indianapolis Opera performance was placed at the architectural crown jewel of the historic center of Indianapolis night entertainment and black social life, Madam Walker Theatre . And among the visiting stars who used to play in the clubs in and around Indiana Avenue was Charlie Parker, one of the founding fathers of bebop. Charlie Parker sings of his devotion to his sax.  Parker's life featured moments of triumph and recognition by fellow musicians who saw that bebop swept the cobwebs away from the Swing Era, while at the same time narrowing jazz's public approval by removing the genre from its crucial link to social dancing. Harmonies were thrust away from their

Ann and Rachelle size each other up before ordeal. The witticism credited to poet-critic Randall Jarrell that academic battles are vicious because the stakes are so low has dated rather surprisingly in our era, when larger social tensions raise the stakes significantly in the educational field. The struggle is pitched up toward a weaponized resolution in Idris Goodwin''s "Blackademics."  Fonseca Theatre Company opened the one-act drama Friday night in a production brimful of hip-hop buzz and scrutiny of black sisterhood and academic ambition. The 21st-century stakes are indeed high when higher education's focus on diversity is subject to whims of administrative fashion and political power centers. There are no more tempests in teapots of the kind Jarrell made fun of in the mid-20th century. The focus on African-American literature that Rachelle, an ambitious young teacher, has developed turns out to be too narrow to secure her career as "people of color"

 Far from my favorite place to see theater in Indianapolis,  Shelton Auditorium  may well be the proper home for  Southbank Theatre 's ambitious production of "Man of La Mancha." The steep pitch of its stadium setting in an expanded semicircle in straight-back pews evokes both sacred and secular traditions. Messages of import, matters for both study and meditation, are at home in such a venue. The stark beauty of the environment has to contend with compromises in comfort and perhaps even safety. Entertainment nonetheless also claims room in Shelton, where this company is in residence. That value is upheld in the way the cast invests controlled energy in the prize-winning musical under the direction of Marcia Eppich-Harris. The peak results in Thursday's opening-night performances were those of Paul Hansen as Cervantes/Don Quixote, Jessica Hawkins as Aldonza/Dulcinea, and Anthony Nathan as Sancho Panza. Alonso Quijana on way to real knighthood under the Golden Helmet.

In his concise oral program notes from the stage, Camden Shaw proposed a theme linking the three pieces the Dover Quartet played in its concert Wednesday night for the Ensemble Music Society. Dover Quartet on the move The string quartet's cellist admitted that it's a stretch sometimes to impose a thematic interpretation on a program, but he ventured that the music by Joaquin Turina, Leos Janacek, and Franz Schubert has in common the composers' attempts to "work through something in their minds." The vagueness of that wording nonetheless applied well to what the Dovers offered the audience at the Indiana History Center. He was alluding to how dangerous life's tasks, whether self-imposed or not, can be to carry out or even move toward resolution. Composers work with problems that aren't purely musical, in other words, and they do so through mastery of their craft. By extension, these chronologically distant masterpieces apply well to the magnified uncertaint

Anthony Kniffen had a helpful composer chat. Wynton Marsalis has grown his musical footprint to become the Bigfoot striding across the jazz-classical landscape. His initial impact as a 20-year-old trumpeter seesawing between jazz and classical performance soon resulted in a decision to stick to jazz. But in making that choice, the now 62-year-old New Orleans maestro as a composer has looked for long-form stature and ensemble splendor in a genre not known for sustaining long forms. Jazz packed with extended solo flights — a la John Coltrane — is not structurally substantial. So there often needs to be programmatic content, particularly on African-American themes, to provide breadth of expression. Marsalis' model has been Duke Ellington, notably in such works as "Black, Brown, and Beige" and "Harlem." Marsalis made his mark on this tradition with "In This House, On This Morning," the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Blood on the Fields," and "From

Caught up, as one inevitably is, in Michael Schelle's gift for musical plays on words, I've borrowed that privilege and stretched it to label the concert he called "Schelle, Sasaki, and Friends" in a wretched pun on the French title of Olivier Messiaen's "Visions de l'Amen." Butler University's longtime composer in residence avails himself of the amenities of his professional position, in the dictionary sense of "something that conduces to comfort, convenience, or enjoyment." These human amenities are students, former students, and Jordan College of Arts colleagues, plus his wife Miho Sasaki, assembled for a riotous kaleidoscope of short pieces. They are presumably a far cry from those in the P.D.Q. Bach cantata "Iphigenia in Brooklyn," with its poignant recitative lines "and in a vision Michael Schelle sizes things up. Iphigenia saw her brother Orestes, who was being chased by the Amenities." Collectively Schelle g