Jay Harvey Upstage

 The glory of brass instruments fits well into an expansive definition of Eastertide, so Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra and the Second Presbyterian Church Sanctuary Choir joined forces Sunday afternoon for "O Radiant Dawn," a program of sacred music by J.S. Bach and Jan Dismas Zelenka. Three trumpets for Bach, four for Zelenka helped make sure there would be plenty of splendor in movements of both works where glory was being proclaimed. Michelle Louer, director of music and fine arts at Second Presbyterian, conducted the concert in the church's spacious sanctuary, which is acoustically sumptuous as well. The Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra revealed its historically informed performing acumen with Ingrid Matthews, a professor at Indiana University, as guest concertmaster. The spotlight turned on her to fine effect in the alto aria "Benedictus" of Zelenka's "Missa Paschalis," which revealed soprano soloist Madeline Apple Healey at her best level of t...

Though some of opera's loftiest achievements fit under the genre of tragedy, the art form had to escape the 18th-century strictures of opera seria   and set aside ancient gods for sad, stately operas to attract the public's esteem. It's more than sentimentality that reinforces our love for happy endings; it's also the perennial gift of music to raise our spirits uniquely.  Mozart is chief among the examples of comic genius in music, and "The Marriage of Figaro" stands at the summit, partly for skill at illuminating the emotions of real people without overstatement.  Indianapolis Opera opened a production worthy of this masterpiece Friday evening in the Tobias Theater at Newfields. Resourcefully put together from an original production at Northern Lights Music Festival  with stage direction here by Jessica Burton, the show has the special advantage of guest conductor Bernard McDonald. Director of Opera at Florida State University, McDonald brings a vast resum é...

 Influential as composer and pianist from his early eminence on the Prestige label, Mal Waldron (1925- Mal Waldron's career had a mental-health break.  2002) came through a nervous breakdown in the 1960s to launch a successful second phase of his career, gaining a sustained reputation internationally.  On the path to his late harvest he appeared with a trio at Chicago's Jazz Showcase. From the archives of club owner Joe Segal, the eminent "jazz detective" Zev Feldman has made a recording of Waldron's appearance in 1979 publicly available under the title "Stardust & Starlight at the Jazz Showcase" (Resonance Records ). It's part of an '"open sesame" effect Feldman's friendship with the late Joe Segal and his son Wayne is having, yielding more results for Resonance. Waldron's playing, supported by bassist Steve Rodby and drummer Wilbur Campbell, has the depth and careful consideration of the songs, most of them standards, tha...

To sort out my positive response to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra' s April 24 concert, let me bring to the forefront two aspects of Jun Märkl's leadership that deserve more consideration: his uncanny insight into accompaniment and his rapport with the audience. The music director has the orchestra in ready-responsive shape, to start with. If there's something subordinate to a soloist worth bringing out, he knows how to do it.  When the violas dig into their prominent line in the first movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor and the tempo increases, everyone is instantly on board. I had wondered at first if the "Allegro moderato" tempo was too moderate to start with, but very soon it was evident the launch was just right.  Near the end of that movement, there are some tender cello phrases that the ISO section produced with unanimity. In the second movement, with its prominent clarinet, nothing seemed incidental. When first-chair players...

Belle reflects on rising tide of deceased "cousins." The fascination of murderous behavior, centered on one person over time, seems to have entertainment value, especially when the victims are numerous and mystery surrounds their deaths, as well as the perpetrator's. In journalistic terms, it's a story with legs (some of them dismembered from the bodies they belonged to). When you walk into the Shelton Auditorium to attend Southbank Theatre Company 's "Hell's Belle," carnival posters greet you, flashing into view the media frenzy that fed this public fascination before the broadcast era.  The backdrop of the thrust stage, behind a few pieces of substantial farmhouse furniture, becomes from time to time a place to display historical photos and verbal messages. Amalia Howard's play carries into the production a concern for the reality of what Belle Gunness was up to in LaPorte, Indiana, in the first decade of the 20th century. The grim business of ...

 Joe Henderson came out of Lima, Ohio, with an evident curiosity and receptivity to anything he could do on his tenor saxophone. He went from the northwestern Ohio city to the regional jazz mecca of Detroit, where he studied music at Wayne State University and began honing his professional associations. He never drew in the artistic boundaries close to what he was used to. There was always some new way of reaching out beyond his hard-bop roots. Joe Henderson in the '70s In one of producer Zev Feldman' s most illuminating presentations of live club dates by modern masters of the music, we get an extended exposure to what Henderson was like in the welcoming environment of Chicago's Jazz Showcase. The engagement came in February 1978 with a bassist (Steve Rodby) and drummer (Danny Spencer) well known in the venue. The quartet was boosted by the burgeoning eminence by a rising star at the piano, Joanne Brackeen.  "Consonance" is the two-disc set available to the worl...

More evidence came forward this weekend of Jun Märkl's knack for programming, though more wasn't required. The music director's long view of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's classical season rests on the firm support of each program's integrity and balance. In macro and micro terms alike, he's got a fine track record.  The newly popular late-afternoon time of each weekend's concluding concert is proving popular, as I found out firsthand Saturday when the orchestra played music by Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saens and Fauré. Three of the five works allowed four principals to speak musically with a French accent. Märkl thus underlined his sensitivity to French distinctiveness with the same insight and radiance that he has long lent to the Austro-German mainstream. Painter in sound: Claude Debussy Especially revelatory was the sole piece after intermission, Debussy's  suite "Images," which slowly cohered from separate tone pictures that illustrate ...

New staging: Vamp and title character in 'An American in Paris' Rediscovery of the alchemical result of dance and live music together is especially welcome in the fourth collaboration of Dance Kaleidoscope and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra . Opening night of "American Sound" Friday certified the partnership's strength once again at Schrott Center for the Arts. The national theme includes a couple of pieces set to American music with the signature styles of the current DK artistic director, Joshua Blake Carter, and his predecessor, David Hochoy, making welcome returns in the company's schedule. The difference is the animating presence of the ICO, conducted with sparkle and precision by its music director, Matthew Kraemer. Yet the real treat was to get further acquaintance with DK rehearsal director  Sean Aaron Carmon  in his new work, "City on Fire." The piece takes its title and the theme behind its movement from the ensemble number signaling ...

Ebene Quartet paid its third visit here with different personnel  In "The Pilgrim's Progress," Mr. Facing Both Ways is an allegorical no-no in the strict Christian terms of someone who cannot resist looking on both the sacred and profane paths forward. This amounted to one of the author John Bunyan's warnings against waywardness. In musical terms, the evidence of a divided consciousness may also be labeled a fault. Yet Claude Debussy succeeded in forging a new musical style that has amazingly found acceptance among music-lovers with conservative tastes for almost a century and a half. Still, innovation is basic to everything he wrote.  My predecessor as music critic for the Michigan newspaper I worked for long ago memorably dismissed  "impressionism" (a term Debussy rejected but continues to adhere to his music) as "the petering-out of well-worn romantic trails."  But such a performance as the Ebene Quartet laid down of the French composer's St...

 The artistic directors of Ronen Chamber Ensemble designed a program this past weekend where they brought in a guest string quartet to nail down a program titled "Americana" firmly in masterpiece territory. Gregory Martin, Alastair Howlett, Jennifer Christen Oboist Jennifer Christen and flutist Alastair Howlett invited Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra colleagues to play Dvorak's "American" Quartet (no. 2 in F major, op. 96) for the second half of concerts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and the University of Indianapolis. I heard the latter Monday evening after a circuitous drive to the city's south side, thanks to construction along I-65 South. It was worth the extra travel to hear ISO concertmaster Kevin Lin head the guest musicians on the first violin part, with Ziqing Guo on second, Zhanbo Zheng, viola, and CJ Collins, cello.  Lin's leadership, showing his usual connection to the emotional heft of a score on top of technical security, was spectacul...

Residents, stranded passengers reflect on what they've been through.  Disaster generates a leap across barriers of strangeness and reserve in "Come from Away," the final production of Indiana Repertory Theatre 's 2025-26 season. Visited Sunday at the last performance of opening weekend, the award-winning musical  had attracted an audience obviously primed to enjoy an uplifting show.  Its hundred-minute run time requires an extraordinary amount of emotional buy-in. But by now the public comes in already enthralled by the story of how a small town in Newfoundland played generous host to thousands of stranded airline passengers on September 11, 2001. I was well advanced into middle age on that disturbing day, but the audience that "Come from Away" can now attract includes many young people for whom 9/11 takes on the aura of myth.  Like most myths, 9/11 carries a great burden of sorrow. This show touches on that burden often, but the primary emotional payoff is ...

In the tango spirit: ISO concertmaster Kevin Lin  Thematic unity helps symphony programs to cohere in attracting audiences, and who can resist the lure of dance underpinnings even when you're expected to stay in your seat for a concert?  This is what unifies "The Rhythm of Dance," this weekend's Classical Series concerts by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra . There's significant relief, however, in the inclusion of Schubert's deep-delving masterpiece in two movements, Symphony No.8 in B minor ("Unfinished"). The theme is carried out by Richard Strauss's magnificent, sweeping "Rosenkavalier" Suite, with its famous waltzes, by the "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires," by the Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla, and by "Dance of the Paper Umbrellas," an appetizer by the contemporary Uzbekistan composer Elena Kats Chernin, a piece of childlike buoyancy and tenderness similar to the Rossini/Respighi ballet, "La Bo...

My first exposure to the remarkable French pianist Michel Petrucciani was a record marking his early outburst onto the international jazz scene as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1982.  Despite the rapport with audiences Lloyd had dependably, I never warmed to his playing, which seemed a bit like John Coltrane watered down for jazz-curious hippies. It takes an assertive pianist to carve out a firm profile in any quartet led by a saxophonist (classic case in point: McCoy Tyner with Coltrane). The freedom Petrucciani displays in this two-disc set takes the form of a loosened, more expansive style that eliminates the need to compete in facility and impact with anyone else on the bandstand.  The pianist's performance on this gig displays the torrential energy typical of his playing, his strong hands belying the fragility of his body, which was hobbled by a brittle-bones disease (osteogenesis imperfecta) that subjected him to frequent injury and...

One of the landmark small groups in jazz was the nonet that also gave birth to a new branch on the living jazz tree. The growth of a way of playing and writing that owed nothing to bebop and very little to the fading swing era came about in three recording sessions in 1949 and 1950, later to be packaged as a Capitol LP titled "The Birth of the Cool." Kent Hickey put together ensemble for centennial tribute.  Miles Davis was the leader, and his style in these settings raised his profile in the jazz community. This is his centennial year, and so Kent Hickey,  a trumpeter from a much younger generation and one of local renown, took up the birthday banner to lead nine musicians re-creating "The Birth of the Cool."  The band sounded great Tuesday night at the Jazz Kitchen . The driving sound of something new still adheres to "Move," a Denzil Best composition that led off the performance, as it did the original LP issue. That's not counting the short appetiz...

Mitzi Westra's performances are well-remembered.   Mezzo-soprano Mitzi Westra minded her academic Ps and Qs while also  singing with buoyant freedom and expressive heft in a faculty recital Monday night at the University of Indianapolis. "Romance Languages" was the rubric under which selections of Italian, Portuguese, French, and Italian art songs were artfully placed with spoken introductions emphasizing the diction challenges in each of the four languages. The lecture element was succeeded by her enchanting  interpretations, accompanied insightfully by Elisabeth Hoegberg, piano, in Ruth Lilly Performance Hall, Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center .  I have long been pleased to attend Westra's performances, usually in context with other singers, and significantly in such crowd favorites as Handel's "Messiah." The way she put across such alto arias as "He was despised" and "O Thou, That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion"  alone has provide...

Vivian exults in partnering with Di and Val. Like any other sport, warming up for death may be a fitness regime, or it may look like death warmed over. The tension between approaches to the final chapter facing everyone may invite more than a touch of humor.  Wendy Herlich went full bore into mortality's comic potential in writing "Wasabia," a 2024 one-act that the Phoenix Theatre is opening this weekend in the Basile Theater. The booklet for the new production, directed by Brian Balcom on the Phoenix's Basile Stage, carries a playwright's note that indicates personal reasons for dealing with death unflinchingly, as well as humorously. She has centered the emotional glitch that brings humor into play in several episodes that involve two secondary characters in various guises, representing drugs used in assisted suicide.  Legal protection for the choice is under consideration or approved among an increasing number of states. That trend is the subject of one of the...

  Antje Weithaas is ensemble guest on this tour.  After lighter music of great polish and right to the point of coordinated virtuosity occupied the first half, the visiting Israeli Chamber Project, including a guest violinist from Germany, Antje Weithaas , moved into high seriousness with the advantage of familiarity after intermission.   Ensemble Music Society presented the seven visiting musicians in an arrangement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, op. 55 ("Eroica") at the Indiana History Center Wednesday night. Many in the audience had recently experienced the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's performance of the original work under music director Jun M ä rkl's inspired direction. The appropriately well-designed arrangement by Yuval Shapiro was superbly played by the visitors. Simply the repeat of the exposition in the first movement held additional interest that the full-orchestra account wouldn't necessarily provide.  There were details brought out...