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Poised, passionate launch of American Piano Awards with Avery Gagliano

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Avery Gagliano got the Premiere Series of the 2025 American Piano Awards off to a robust start Sunday afternoon at the Indiana History Center. Avery Gagliano now studies with Schiff. She is the first of five finalists to be presented here in solo recitals plus a concerto performance, one each month through February. That will be followed by adjudicated chamber-music performances, then a finale featuring the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in April after which the top prize will be awarded. After her Curtis Institute of Music training, the 23-year-old pianist from Washington, D.C., has just started studying with Sir Andras Schiff in Kronberg, Germany. Immediately with her program opener Sunday — J.S. Bach's  French Suite No. 4 in E-flat — some suggestions of Schiff's Bach style, the Bach-on-piano standard for me in recordings to counter the powerful Glenn Gould approach,  were apparent. There was the suave legato displayed in the Allemande, then the vivid definition of the le
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ISO centennial salute: Supremacy of Gershwin's songs soars on 'Rhapsody in Blue' level

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It's been a hundred years since the ultimate in crossover musical achievement premiered: Geroge Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." In celebration, Jack Everly, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's principal pops conductor, has made the pioneering work for piano and orchestra the centerpiece of the season's second program in the Pops Series.  The celebratory concert Friday was all-Gershwin at a high level, heralded by the mayor's proclamation that Oct. 11 was a day in honor of the ISO in its 40th-annniversary weekend at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Apart from the "Rhapsody," with the solo part incisively performed by Stewart Goodyear, the focus was Gershwin's songs. Everly told the huge audience, with some pride, that there are 30 songs in this show.  Some of them were in a few show overtures, of which several had choral arrangements by Eric Stark, artistic director of the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, which sang them.  The large chorus seemed to b
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'Deep River': Legacy of black spirituals refreshed by Alchymy Viols and Michael Walker II

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The repertoire formerly embraced by the term "Negro spirituals" occupies a unique place among music to have emerged from the New World. The melodies and the passion behind the songs forged a sustaining insight that can be appreciated on both musical and spiritual levels. They have generated a wealth of arrangements. Philip Spray, violone and director That range is confirmed and vividly embodied in orchestrations for an early-music ensemble of harp and strings, using arrangements by several historically significant black musicians. Philip Spray directs Alchymy Viols in "Deep River: Spirituals Cross-Currents," a program compatibly presented with countertenor Michael Walker II. The Navona Records release benefits throughout from glowing performances exquisitely recorded.  Michael Walker II in the recording studio Walker's well-centered, floating tone is displayed immediately in the first piece, "Over My Head," sung without accompaniment. Later there i
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Welcome return of Mario Venzago launches the ISO's 2024-25 Classical Series

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Among the puzzling cliches this music critic has found in the writing of some colleagues is the tendency to object to variations in tempo that strike the reviewer as breaking the momentum or introducing hitches in a work's steady movement forward. I think any variations in tempo that the score doesn't explicitly require are not necessarily interruptions in the cohesiveness of symphonic movement, for example. Sometimes they convey the meaning of a composition more fully than a narrowly precise performance.  Granted, complicating the pulse of a piece of music can verge on unsteadiness, for which the conductor ought to be held to account. I'm not saying that  bending "interpretation" in matters of tempo can't be excessive. But often I wonder: Is the reviewer really bothered by that variety such that the music becomes hard to follow, almost unintelligible? Or is the point simply to cavil at an interpretive choice for the sake of showing off familiarity with the pi
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Indy Jazz Fest shows had separate spotlights on two local icons

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The inimitable Steve Turre as "shellist" If Indianapolis were ever to erect a jazz Mount Rushmore, it would be universally agreed to represent Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, and Freddie Hubbard in perpetual stone. Their legacies have never been lost sight of here, and the latter two have their niches in the current  Indy Jazz Fest .  The Freddie Hubbard tribute portion of the 2024 official kickoff Saturday was intense, but carried too much compacted energy to suit the confines of the Jazz Kitchen . Taken as a whole, the evening's schedule suggested the expansive vibes of the outdoor extravaganza that historically was always risky from the standpoints of weather and financing. At the risk of sounding like a kindergarten teacher, what I heard last weekend used its outdoor voice, not much of its indoor voice. It was clear that time constraints were part of the difficulty. It's not just that Hubbard, one of a handful of universally acknowledged jazz masters from Indianapol
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Bees in their bonnets: Spelling musical launches IRT season

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Your word is "sconce." Spell "sconce." Past master Rona Lisa Peretti supervises the bee. May I have a definition, please? A bracket candlestick or group of candlesticks. Could you use it in a sentence for me? On the way up a side aisle after the opening night performance of "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," I rammed my right shoulder into a sconce. Sconce, s-c-o-n-c-e. That's a real-life example generated from my exit experience Friday night at Indiana Repertory Theatre. Fortunately, the hurt didn't last long, vanishing overnight. My weekend bit of doubles tennis wasn't notably affected today, being about as chockfull of errors as usual. From now, on, I will be more careful watching things attached to walls I move next to.  In the actual event recalled in my example of a spelling-bee sentence, two aspects of the hazards I ran into long ago on the classroom spelling-bee level occur to me. One is the dumb-bunny risk of confusing it w
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Trumpeter Bria Skonberg and compatible sidemen show "What It Means" at Jazz Kitchen

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Bria Skonberg leads the charge on trumpet Wednesday.  The direction she's traveling in musically with her current recording picks up on Bria Skonberg' s link to Louis Armstrong, her first trumpet idol as a budding musician in far-off Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. Now she's established on the New York jazz scene and building devotedly on the legacy of Armstrong's hometown.  Heading a quintet at t he Jazz Kitchen scheduled as an appetizer for the Indy Jazz Fest, which officially kicks off Saturday, the trumpeter-vocalist lost little time in performing "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." For the second set, she sang and played the song, third on the set list,  as if there was no doubt that she knows. And indeed, that current CD is titled "What It Means." I trust her as a true believer in her inspiration from Satchmo: She pronounces his first name as he did, sounding the "s." (Remember his late-in-life hit, where he begins
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