Jay Harvey Upstage

Adam Golka, Matthew Kraemer and ICO revel in top-flight Mozart. Whatever Shakespeare's  characters put their minds and their voices to, they likely had something lasting to say upon any subject.  The fact that we don't know what William Shakespeare felt or said personally about anything, from the spotty biographical evidence available to us, didn't prevent such questionable delight as "Shakespeare in Love" generated  a generation ago — a costume rom-com allowing us to wallow in the young Bard's world as a theater careerist  hungry for patronage, creative encouragement, and, on the side, romantic success.  For the sake of a believable themed program to open its season, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra came up with a more prudent paraphrase of that 1999 movie's title. So Matthew Kraemer and his ensemble began the season delivering "Shakespeare and Love."  That allowed for a little separation, which invited  Adam Golka' s solo appearance in a...

Mahler on ship back to Europe, 1911, near the end of his death-haunted life Veteran of two runs through the American Piano Awards and victorious the second time last year, Michael Davidman is the guest soloist this weekend with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, anchoring the concert's first half on Beethoven before the ensemble expands and takes on extra cargo for Mahler's  Symphony No. 1 in D major.  There was lots of glory in its performance Friday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre, right through to the eight horns standing and pouring extra energy into the concluding measures. That recalled the similar display in  the ISO's Mahler Sixth last spring, crowning music director Jun M ä rkl' s affinity for the late-Romantic composer.  But first to the program's music of more scaled-back energy, reliant on a transformative composer's roots in the Classical period of Mozart and Haydn. A compact account of Beethoven's rarely indulged dramatic flair opened the ...

  Relaxed Pacifica: Vamos, Ganatra, Holloway, Hartman The last time I heard the Pacifica Quartet on the Ensemble Music Society schedule (March 2021), the caution everyone was feeling at the height of the pandemic made live-stream exposure advisable. But the quartet's excellence was already well-known to me via its CD series, "The Soviet Experience." And its stature among local music-lovers was carved in stone with its live   participation in the chamber-music phase of the 2017 American Piano Awards.  With a few personnel changes (in second violin and viola chairs) since its founding 32 years ago, this ensemble has been prolific both in the recording studio and on the concert stage. First violinist Simin Ganatra and cellist Brandon Vamos are the mainstays; the current roster is filled out by second violinist Austin Hartman and violist Mark Holloway. EMS Indianapolis has pitched its tent for the 2026-27 season on the United States' 250th anniversary this year, celeb...

  Even devoid of human figures, the set suggests multiple ways in.  Late into its run, I took in a stage adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code," Indiana Repertory Theatre 's season opening production. It will travel to two other theaters later this season. For this one, it meant unaccustomed catching up, which seems quite suitable to a play that prioritizes catching up to what has been revealed before. The audience is put virtually into the skins and minds of the far-flung characters as a murder mystery turns out to enfold the secret of the ages in Western civilization.  Adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, based on Dan Brown's novel of the same title, the technically splendid production runs through next Sunday at the IRT. Benjamin Hanna directed the show, revealing the sort of manipulative precision that enables some people to solve a Rubik's cube in a dazzling total of seconds.  Dan Brown's recurrent professor, Robert Langdon   I don't know how much h...

The crickets and the fog and the young men of Tarry Town moseying about: like most spooky tales, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" needs just a few signposts of nocturnal mystery to set the appropriate mood, with credit going to the design expertise of Laura E. Glover (lighting) and Mike Lamirand (sound), among others. The version that Dance Kaleidoscope has mounted to start its season adapts Washington Irving's story for a narrative that doesn't need the early American author's flowery language to plunge to the essence of a Tarry Town schoolmaster's credulousness and the insufficiency of his wooing as the linked triggers of his eventual disappearance.   Guest choreographer Joshua L. Peugh has also been in residence to Zay of DK as bewitched schoolmaster Ichabod Crane direct the show, which runs through Oct. 11 at McGowan Hall . On Sunday, DK member Zay gave a fascinating performance as Ichabod Crane, an ambitious, doomed teacher, portrayed as gangly and awkwar...

  There could be little doubt that Karisa Chiu displayed an Karisa Chiu, who has local family links unmistakable star quality in her performance of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto Saturday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre. So it's not a matter of "recency bias," I hope, to find me unsurprised that the jury awarded her the gold medal in the twelfth quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. Heard and seen live-streamed, with Leonard Slatkin conducting a thoroughly engaged Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, her performance of this perpetual audience favorite concluded the IVCI's concerto finals phase. Less than an hour later, jury president Jaime Laredo announced how each of the finalists placed, from sixth to first. To start with, they are Lina Nakano of Japan, sixth; Yesong Sophie Lee of the United States, fifth; Xunye Zhang of China, fourth, each of whom carries the designation of "laureate." Besides Chiu, the 2026 medalists are Elli Ch...

Now the famously non-arm-twisting judging procedure of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis once again approaches validation, as six finalists merge from 38 registered participants who convened on Sept. 17 here to begin the well-organized sorting out of scores independently arrived out, with  any outlying totals ineffective in swaying the juried result. At the end of the concerto finals Saturday night, the three medalists will be announced at Hilbert Circle Theater, with those finishing in fourth, fifth and sixth place honored as laureates. Having missed a large amount of the preliminary and semi-final rounds, it's no surprise that I have first-hand impressions of only two participants to offer, based on those initial phases.  Karisa Chiu My most recent impression is of Karisa Chiu, who comes from a musical family with Indianapolis roots. Her uncle, Frederic Chiu, grew up here and made a notably celebrated appearance at the Van Cliburn competition in 1993, lau...

Original costume designs for "The Rite of Spring"  Lots of risers in the orchestra, lots of youth in the audience.  Clearly something outsize and extra-inviting was on hand Friday night when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra opened the 2026-27 season at Hilbert Circle Theatre. With the program having been already finely honed in performance the night before at Indiana University, the ISO under music director Jun Märkl was especially primed to respond to the historic, perpetually challenging demands of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The 1913 ballet has been  known since almost exclusively as an orchestral showpiece, without any choreography except that conjured up in listeners' heads.  The scenario of the ballet lent the young composer a form, culminating in a virgin's fatal sacrifice to propitiate the gods. The prehistoric Russia evoked suggested that the Ballets Russes creators' enduring innovation would be primarily musical and convulsively...

Over my mostly adolescent years as an Episcopalian, I never had the opportunity of hearing the graveside liturgy that reminds us, according to the Book of Common Prayer: "In the midst of life we are in death."  Somehow I picked up that precise reminder long ago and usefully thought of those ancient words of devotion, both obvious and paradoxical as they are, while attending a performance of "Fun Home" Thursday night. The season-opening production by the Southbank Theatre Company carries the magic of charm and searing revelations as it casts an authentic aura of bitter and illuminating truth at Butler University's Shelton Auditorium . Bruce uncovers Small Alison's forbidden casket fun.   The show's title turns out to be family slang, also with a whiff of paradox, for "funeral home," the Bechdel family business in a small Pennsylvania town. In the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, which forms the basis of this lilting yet  profound musical by Je...

Rob Dixon holds forth in Coltrane celebration. There can be little question that the most appropriate musician to lead an Indy Jazz Fest tribute performance on the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth was Rob Dixon . Jazz fans have had a few decades to appreciate the protean capabilities of the Atlanta-bred tenor   saxophonist. Dixon has been an indefatigable presence on the local music scene, earning him the description "the jazz mayor of Indianapolis." His occasional programming of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" has cemented his connection to the master. In corporate terms, the quartet that offered two Coltrane sets Wednesday at the Jazz Kitchen   did business as the I ndianapolis Jazz Collective. The band took in as special guest Lasana D. Kazembe , a spoken-word artist who proved apt for evoking the Coltrane idealism and displaying an original, intense  manner of representing Coltrane's musical breadth through verbal spectacle. Kembe's contri...

Leah Amory was distinctive in appearance and repertoir e As the 12th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis advances, its launch with performances this week by all the participants may fade as the public and violinists who fall by the wayside direct attention to the survivors in the semifinals and finals. Still, music lovers who don't necessarily favor Bach over Mozart or vice versa may be stunned by the disappearance  of unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas  by the baroque master whose output is considered foundational. In their place in the prelims is one of five sonatas for violin and piano by the late 18th-century Austrian master Mozart (or Franz Schubert's Sonatina in  D major). This decision will lend more prominence to the  focus on Mozart in the Classical Finals (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1),  where his five concertos, marvels for a 19-year-old, are in the competition repertoire. What gives? some may ask. "It's fairer to these kids to ...

Mother of them all: Jeanne Manford joins the parade. The shadow version of "coming out" turns out to have a brilliance all its own. "Everybody's  Favorite Mothers" proclaims the process in an enthralling way that  doesn't skirt the difficulties of owning sexual identity through open self-assertion and garnering the support of loved ones. In a premiere performance seen Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre,   the audience of James Still's new play is brought into a close-up observer/participant's role centered on the emergence of gay-rights momentum and support in the 1970s. Without throwing himself into the briar patch of documentary-genre devotion, the playwright immerses us in a family story complicated by the movement's internal divisions and the unpredictable benefits of a loving ally's imaginative breakthroughs. The watchword evoked a few times in the play — "Vision without action is hallucination" — could be revised, somewhat ...