Jay Harvey Upstage

Mark Ortwein, Peter Hansen, Dean Franke, Gary Walters, and Jon Crabiel constitute Icarus Ensemble. It's heartening to hear how so much potential has borne fruit in the development of an unusual  local band called the Icarus Ensemble . Seven years after its founding, it's an expert collaboration  of three Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra musicians and two members of the Butler University music faculty. Nearly two years ago, I reported in one of my early blog posts how firm a grasp the quintet had on its musical vision and how well the musicians seemed to be suited to fulfilling it. They have since come up with a "book" dependably showcasing the versatile front line of violinist Dean Franke and multi-instrumentalist Mark Ortwein, whom you'll hear on bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, or electric bassoon depending on the piece. The rhythm section acts well as a unit, yet is often conspicuous in the texture for the individuality of each member. Sunday night Ica...

Evan, Marc and Serge weigh their responses to a painting — and to one another — in Carmel Theatre Company's "Art." If we didn't need validation, we wouldn't need either art or friends. But in Yazmina Reza's "Art," the indelible human appetite for all three becomes entangled — with results both funny and sad. Midway through a nine-performance run when seen Saturday night, the Carmel Theatre Company production gets all the details right in presenting this intricate tussle among three Parisian buddies. The trigger in the crisis between Marc and Serge, played with well-calibrated tension by Larry Adams and Daniel Shock, respectively, is Serge's purchase of a painting by a fashionable artist for 200,000 francs. The playwright has thus brought to bear upon the conflict two major causes of the way human beings separate themselves from others: wealth and prestige.  But there is another element in the rift that trumps everything: The expensive a...

In the vast amusement park of verse for children, a favorite attraction in recent years is Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends," whose title poem opens up the time-tested pathway to adventure that is one of the perpetual promises of childhood. In my distant youth, that road found me in "A Child's Garden of Verses," an old-fashioned evocation of innocence and wonder by Robert Louis Stevenson. Successful children's authors often have another side — not far from the same resource that gives them the key to children's love of secrets, resistance to boundaries and the allure of forbidden places.  The current show at Theatre on the Square exposes that lesser-known aspect of Silverstein in bravura style, with those childhood traits subject to alarming mutations. This is make-believe toughened by adult experience. "An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein," as directed by D. Scott Robinson and performed with outsized gusto by a cast of six...

Celebrities are what we have to remind us that money and fame aren't everything, but don't we wish we could realize that after obtaining money and fame? You know, because we would handle it so much better, wouldn't we? That's why the vulnerabilities of famous people are as endearing as what we envy about them. Alex Moore, in Jonathan Tolins' "Buyer and Cellar," gets the whole package in landing a job as the sole employee in Barbra Streisand's fantasy shopping mall in the barn basement of her Malibu home. It dawns on Alex why Streisand has him where she wants him. He has to mind the little shops (one of them a "shoppe") that the singer-actress has set up and furnished, keeping everything tidy and dusted, all while wearing a twee uniform. It's a few steps up on the dignity scale from the costumed figure he formerly inhabited at Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, where working conditions earned it the nickname "Mousewitz" am...

Responding to a close relative suffering from a scanty CD collection is easy for me — especially when our musical tastes overlap considerably. J.S. Bach wrote the Goldbergs Decades of reviewing music have resulted in a home surplus of recordings in several formats. Tossing them out arbitrarily seems a mindless, even philistine, exercise. So whenever I cull my collection I have to spot-check every recording's contents: What's worth listening to again in my declining years — time being of the essence, even in retirement? First target: duplicates of the same repertoire, all the better when the music is unlikely to come up on concert schedules. Even when brother Rick said he didn't even own a Beethoven's 5th on CD (which the Indianapolis Symphony will play next season), it was relatively easy to discard a David Zinman/Zurich Tonhalle account I'd always found hard to like. I won't go into the other nine that I just mailed to him, with one exception: Bach...

The nearly season-long buildup toward the selection of the Cole Porter Fellow in Jazz has no better a guarantee of tension and pleasure than the Premiere Series.  That trio gig at the Jazz Kitchen is the high point in the brief residency each of five finalists selected by the American Pianists Association' s preliminary jury (of which I was honored to be a member) has in town. Kris Bowers has an engaging talent for drawing on related genres. With the appearance of Kris Bowers Saturday night at the Kitchen, which was filled to capacity, the series is complete. Now everyone has to wait till the semifinals March 27 at the Northside club/eatery and the finals at Hilbert Circle Theatre the following evening to learn which of the young pianists will get the inestimable career boost the fellowship provides to its quadrennial recipient. In common with his fellow contestants, Bowers enjoyed the excellent services of local musicians Nick Tucker, bass, and Kenny Phelps, drums, to put...

Jeffrey Kahane displayed flair and sensitivity. The odd absence on most American orchestra schedules of American music has been a puzzle to me ever since the bicentennial boomlet of that repertoire in 1976.  Naively, I thought widespread acquaintance with American composers would whet the appetites of managements and audiences alike to wave the flag, musically speaking, and everyone would benefit year after year. It never happened, though the market allure of world premieres has swelled the number of fresh commissions from composers with a social security number. What about those deuxiemes, those troisiemes, and so on? Better not ask. Well-known names and familiar pieces from the American catalog can still bring out the crowds, however, as was evident at Hilbert Circle Theatre Friday night, when guest artist Jeffrey Kahane played and conducted an all-American concert with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Kahane, appearing for the eighth time as an ISO guest over a 32-y...