Jay Harvey Upstage

Elsewhere I have expressed my dismay that the Supreme Court last Friday leaped into settling a question that ought to have been resolved among the voters and their elected representatives. Despite that, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision holds out the promise of a society I will be happier to live in. In contemplating the future, in which committed same-sex relationships (one of them close to me, and of 35 years' standing) will have legal sanction, a fascinating sidebar in the New York Times' coverage was a feature on how gay culture will have to change, perhaps in ways that are poignant and a little alarming to those within it. It's not my place to assess the potential for stress on the social bonds within the gay community, once same-sex marriage goes mainstream. But the situation reminds me, looking on as a sympathetic outsider, of similar stresses that threatened social cohesion among African-Americans with the decline of segregation (still in many ways a de facto r...

The Indianapolis Early Music Festival took a "Roman holiday" on a rain-soaked central Indiana evening Friday, welcoming the baroque trio Aeris (with guests Charles Weaver, guitar and chitarrone, and Nell Snaidas, soprano) for a program of Handel "the Wanderer" and some Italian contemporaries  with one close predecessor. (Bad weather had led the I ndianapolis Symphony Orchestra to cancel its Symphony on the Prairie concert; the program is scheduled to be performed tonight.) Aeris is focused on music of the Italian baroque. The New York trio specializes in the Italian baroque, with its florid and moody inspiration and its vivid melodic and rhythmic character.  It's not hard to see how this sort of music stirred the young Handel, who went on to flourish in Italian opera (staged in England) and English oratorios. America's "Messiah" mania has tended to obscure the breadth of this achievement, but in recent years more attention has been paid to ...

  News item: Apple withdraws Civil War games from sale over Confederate flag sensitivity. http://toucharcade.com/…/06/25/apple-removes-confederate-f…/ Photograph of Abraham Lincoln late in life shows the strain on him of having to pretend there was a Civil War going on. Hoople, ND -- Apple's decision to pull Civil War games from online availability turns out to have better historical grounding than it may appear, according to a couple of historians on the faculty of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.  The two professors have concluded after years of exhaustive research that the American Civil War in fact never took place. Astonished by this revelation, I spoke to the scholars -- Wright S. Raine and Ambrose Truelove -- by phone earlier today. "Professor Raine," I began, "how can you possibly overturn decades of scholarship, including an abundance of primary documents and photographs, ...

Guest conductor Fawzi Haimor was born in Chicago. The tempestuous virtuosity of Armenian pianist Nareh Arghamanyan held an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra audience spellbound Thursday afternoon as the second annual  "Lunch Break" series, now expanded to six concerts, presented some familiar Tchaikovsky to music-lovers in Hilbert Circle Theatre. Fawzi Haimor, resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, was on the podium for the second concert in the series. Both guest artists will appear in two Symphony on the Prairie concerts this weekend, collaborating on the same work. In addition, the Mussorgsky-Ravel "Pictures at an Exhibition" will be performed under Haimor's direction. Nareh Arghamanyan put her stamp on Tchaikovsky. The sole "Lunch Break" piece was everybody's favorite Russian composer's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. It was a warhorse long before Van Cliburn made it even better-known after his competitio...

DM Jazz Eight: Moving smartly into Rich Dole's arrangement of a Johnny Hodges number. Hearing the first set of the eight-month-old ensemble co-led by Gene Markiewicz and Rich Dole Wednesday night offered indications of bright promise at the Jazz Kitchen. The DM Jazz Eight is an octet (duh!) with this instrumentation: two saxes, two trumpets, one trombone, and the conventional rhythm section (piano, bass, drums). The band largely uses a book left by former Indianapolis valve-trombonist-bandleader Phil Allen , supplemented by several Dole arrangements. I came in as the band was setting out with Duke Ellington's "In a Mellotone," creating a relaxed groove featuring something that immediately appealed to me: trumpeter Larry McWilliams plunger-soloing crisp phrases behind the ensemble.  He has the perfect instincts for this kind of texture, and something similar came through later as the band played Dole's arrangement of Johnny Hodges' "Fur Piece....

Cultural clashes often beget cultural amalgamation and new syntheses that are impossible to imagine without one cherished tradition rubbing up against another. Montreal-based Ensemble Caprice is led by Matthias Maute (second from right). Ensemble Caprice, a Montreal group led by charismatic recorder player Matthias Maute, explored the theme here Sunday with particular emphasis on the 16th- and 17th-century effects on European music of exposure to the New World. With the piquant title of "Salsa Baroque: Music of Latin America and Spain," the six musicians (including soprano guest Esteli Gomez ) presented a smoothly integrated concert to a well-filled Basile Auditorium at the Indiana History Center. It was the second concert in the current Indianapolis Early Music Festival . Maute wove a spoken narrative throughout the program. It had touches of poetry about it, asking the audience to imagine itself facing the adventure of travel to the New World at the dawn of European...

Americans who grew up in the mid- to late 20th century carried a fearful caricature of what Russia had become after social pressures of the 1800s gave birth, midwifed by war, to the global red menace of the Soviet Union. Much of the discreet charm of Anton Chekhov's emerging bourgeoisie and beleaguered aristocracy foreshadows that cataclysm in muted terms. But it took the tolerant, observant temperament of the man Chekhov to produce a play like "The Cherry Orchard," not a convenient set of circumstances tracing the decline of the old order. Masterpieces aren't generated by either social change or the nature of language, despite what cultural theorists of various stripes tell us. EclecticPond Theatre Company's production wisely senses how seamlessly Chekhov placed his awareness of a changing world in the personalities of his characters. As seen Sunday evening at the Basile Opera Center, the performance honored the short-lived Russian playwright's compassio...