Jun Märkl welcomes 'the jazz guy' to end iSO's classical season

Thumb's up from pianist-composer Ozone

Highly anticipated reacquaintance with a guest soloist rarely presents itself to me in an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra season. Looking forward to Makoto Ozone as this weekend's piano soloist resembled slightly a reunion with a school sort-of-friend you didn't know well but have some pleasant memories of.

So, Ozone wasn't exactly an old jazz chum of mine. When he was active in this country, I never heard him live, but I have two of his recordings: an LP from 1986 titled "After," when he was in his mid-20s and just past his American education in jazz at Berklee in Boston, and "Pandora," a 2000 CD when his American career blossomed as he headed a classy trio with eminent young sidemen, bassist James Genus and drummer Clarence Penn.

Listening to them again a couple of days ago, I was struck by the access of maturity and individual style in records issued 14 years apart. But the spread of his talents and artistic reach has been immense since then. Ozone returned to his homeland and I lost track of his work, and now he's in his lively mid-60s, bringing a jazz sensibility to both standard and original compositions. Märkl told the audience he just regards his occasional collaborator as "the jazz guy." His website reveals how much of his recording and concert activity I've missed, but mentally springing across huge gaps in the Ozone bio has been fun. 

On Friday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre he offered a spirited interpretation of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, one of Rachmaninoff's most compact and original pieces, apart from the Russian composer's extensive output for solo piano. Then came a multicultural Ozone piece called "O'berek," which brought ISO percussionist Jon Crabiel to the front of the stage as duo partner, playing a box drum he sat on and played with flashing hands. Occasionally he ran the heel of his right shoe upward against the box, temporarily altering the pitch with a glissando effect.

Called a cajon, the instrument originated in Peru. With a cameo addition to the cajon-piano jam, Mark Ortwein emerged out of the bassoon section carrying his soprano sax. He took a position downstage to swell the sound and the intricacy of the pulse-pounding piece. (The other ISO member distinction of the evening was the annual announcement of the Patch Award, honoring a member's extraordinary contributions to the organization, to acting assistant concertmaster Vincent Meklis.)

With Rachmaninoff's rhapsody, which makes memorable use of Paganini's 24th caprice for solo violin, Ozone lent improvisational charm to piano-cadenza passages, especially as the composition works its sometimes mysterious way up to the famous 18th variation, a heartthrob of late romanticism. To the stride and occasional haunting the composer applied to his material on the way there, Ozone inflected the piano part with touches of Gershwin on his way to the effusion of melody everyone knows by heart.

The novelty was wholly acceptable to my ears, though I didn't like Ozone's dawdling extension of that 18th variation. Along the way, though, I found the zestful spirit of the original fully intact. The evocation of the medieval "Dies irae" chant could be properly shrugged off. There was much to enjoy about the fury occasionally whipped up by piano and orchestra together. Toward the end, there was a delightful hitch in the climactic progress after one of Ozone's inventive episodes, with teasing eye contact between soloist and conductor that elicited audience laughter.

The program opened, as it will at 5:30 this afternoon, with Benjamin Britten's witty, lighthearted adaptation of several Rossini songs, to which the British composer also applied his Italian predecessor's title of "Soirees musicales." 

The appetizer was wisely chosen. The feast even concludes in a triumphant mood: Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major ("Spring") occupied the concert's entire second half. Well-coordinated string phrasing provided authentic lyrical relief in the first movement; the second featured a gorgeous tune presented with warm unanimity by the cello section. The lyricism throughout the slow movement enjoyed several sudden flowerings.  The scherzo had a daring heaviness of rhythm that didn't overshadow the positive mood, but rather seemed to evoke fleet-footed peasant dance styles. It gave way abruptly and convincingly to the finale, Allegro animato e grazioso.

With Schumann, it's always tempting to find signs of his manic-depressive temperament before it overtook him in middle age. The Spring symphony offers little support for that interpretation. And in deft performances like this one, the composer's reputation for muddy orchestration can be dispelled with consistent rhythmic alacrity and allowing each instrumental strand to stand out clearly. So it was Friday night, generating summer-long memories, no doubt, of the ISO's current level of excitement, alertness, and tonal sheen under its music director's baton.