Jay Harvey Upstage

It became close to scandalous when Mario Venzago was messily separated from the music directorship of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra four years ago last summer. Mario Venzago has been rapturously received. But with a different CEO and altered board leadership, the ISO is formally admitting Venzago into its official history Friday when it unveils a portrait of him to honor his tenure as its sixth music director (2002-2009). The occasion is his return to the Hilbert Circle Theatre podium, with full-length evening concerts Friday and Saturday. Interviewed  at the Conrad Hotel downtown, Venzago looked refreshed and relaxed a few hours after the historic reunion opened with a Classical Coffee Concert.  The traditionally abbreviated program left out Schumann's Symphony No. 4 in D minor, but included the other two pieces also to be heard in the evening concerts: Glazunov's Violin Concerto, with soloist Vadim Gluzman , and Mahler's Totenfeier. The last work may look...

Deborah Henson-Conan t turns the sedate harp into an instrument beyond cliches. The trailblazing musician, with decades of experience behind her,  puts her iconoclasm about the harp directly into her act. She has a song called "I Wanna Sing the Blues" that indicates a struggle with her parents about the harp's genteel image and how uncomfortable that made her as a girl. Is that song autobiographical? "Yes and no," was Henson-Conant's response in a phone interview Oct. 23. The harpist will play and sing with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra Saturday, Nov. 9, at  the Athenaeum Theatre, 401 E. Michigan St. Music director Kirk Trevor will conduct. Here's how the ICO is marketing the event on video. And here:   She explains that she started with the ukulele, accompanying her folk-singing. Her musically minded parents (her mother was an opera singer) tried to get lessons to work with her, but she kept changing instruments, moving to guitar and piano ...

An extended encounter with  a dance and music tradition previously familiar only in adapted forms can be like a peek into another world. Knowing the Liszt Hungarian rhapsodies and many of the works of Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly allows only a "high-art" acquaintance with the people's music that gave those composers much of their material: scales, rhythms, structures. The real thing has plenty of elaboration and detail all its own, while presumably retaining the generating significance of music and dance in traditions that go back centuries. The Hungarian State Folk Dance Ensemble, plus six instrumentalists and a singer, visited the Palladium in Carmel Saturday night. The program focused on group dances, most of them fast and deftly arranged so as to balance ensemble patterns with individual improvisation, each display of which was rooted in a similar dance vocabulary. Women of the Hungarian State Folk Dance Ensemble For the women, embroidered costumes with swirl...

Programming has always been a strength of David Hochoy's artistic direction of Dance Kaleidoscope, the Indianapolis contemporary-dance troupe that opened its 42nd season Friday at Indiana Repertory Theatre. "New Dimensions" as a title lacks a certain sizzle, but that can't be said about the complementary energy of the three works offered under that rubric this weekend. Butler University's dance program got a showcase position in between works by guest choreographer Christopher Dolder and Hochoy, whose "IconoGlass" (1998)  has been  revived for the current company. Cynthia Pratt's new piece for her Butler Ballet dancers is a brooding rhapsody of dark lyricism called "The Whole Against  the Sky." The title comes from an observation of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke about how people overcome inevitable distances that separate them and can eventually see "the other whole against the sky." At first, to low, rumbling music by Val...

Six  residents of Rancho Mirage share thinly sliced wry toast. Achieving a certain level of material comfort represents for many Americans the object of the Declaration of Independence's promise of "the pursuit of happiness." Those people who live in gated communities may fancy that Jeffersonian right a matter of covenant, fleshed out by such details as what outbuildings are permitted and what color you can paint your house. In the play now being given a "rolling world premiere" at the Phoenix Theatre , the friends who gather at the home of Nick and Diane Dahner expect to revel in the satisfaction of the ingrown social relationships their exclusive neighborhood implicitly celebrates. But in the first scene of Steven Dietz's "Rancho Mirage," the anxiety woven into such friendships seems almost contractual: Is prickly guest Louise partial to a wine called "Menage a Trois" or one called "Three Lovers," and was the wrong wine ...

Enjolras (Nick Fitzer) rallies the rebels at the barricade. "Les Miserables," the hit musical that had everybody brushing up on their 19th-century French history, has entered the 2013 schedule of Beef & Boards Dinner Theatre with a splash. A lot of sad events pop up in the course of the Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil musical, but it has scored big worldwide with mainstream audiences, thanks to its impactful songs and the feeling the music communicates that the intersection of public and private worlds can be thrilling, if not often fortunate. Beef & Boards' production, seen Oct. 23, is smoothly knit together and buoyed by powerful performances in the roles of Jean Valjean, Inspector Javert, Eponine, and Fantine, among others. State-of-the-art body miking means the show is often quite loud. Full-voice singing isn't very flatteringly represented when projected at that level. Nonetheless, the expressive range and energy injected into both e...

As an admirer of two of its Cedille recordings, I looked forward to the Lincoln Trio 's appearance to open the 20013-14 Music at Shaarey Tefilla series at Congregation Shaarey Tefilla in Carmel. The Chicagoans, originally scheduled to open last year's series,  did not disappoint. Violinist Desiree Ruhstraht, cellist David Cunliffe and pianist Marta Aznavoorian lived up to expectations. The Lincoln Trio displayed strong rapport in music of Beethoven, Higdon, Garrop and, with the addition of series host and violist Michael Strauss, Turina. Desiree Ruhstraht, David Cunliffe, Marta Azavoorian They were particularly skillful in asserting themselves as individuals without nicking the ensemble unity.  That balance has something to with the zest you impart to the music on the stand or rack before you; the hard-to-define firmness of group identity comes from experience (the Lincoln has a 10-year history) and using your ears moment-to-moment in concert. To take the 21st-centu...

A celebration of the violin makes sense in this harvest season as a way for the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis to reap the bounty of violin training and performance hereabouts. To supplement the return appearance of David Chan, 1994 bronze medalist in the quadrennial competition, IVCI had the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Virtuosi  and Chamber Orchestra on hand Sunday afternoon at the Indiana Landmarks Center's Grand Hall. Full disclosure: I am the parent of a Virtuosi alumnus who has since taught at the School of Music's String Academy, the nurturing ground of these adept precollege musicians. Illustrative of their expert training, among other qualities: a habit of listening to each other, solid rapport virtually assuring unanimity of attach and release, dynamics and tempo. With good attention to changes in texture and  color, a student sextet performed IU faculty member Atar Arad's arrangement of Prokofiev's Toccata in D minor, a so...

Deborah Voigt has weathered personal crises on the way to reconfiguring her career. There were more than a few hints in a tell-all interview Deborah Voigt gave the New York Times recently that she might be shifting permanently to a more informal type of singing than what she has received her greatest acclaim for. The recital tour that brought her to the Center for the Performing Arts Saturday night demonstrated that singing in her native tongue is something she'd like to exploit more. And the 53-year-old soprano seems poised to emphasize music that requires less stamina than, for instance, the main female role in Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," a Washington National Opera production of which she withdrew from last month. What several hundred people heard at the Palladium was a program focusing on art song in the first half, beginning significantly with a pioneering female American composer, and after intermission mussing the conventionally prim recital co...

The full glory of the Hollywood musical rests in part on the symphonic scoring of the music, with the heritage of the stage musical bringing to the fore both the brashness of Broadway pit bands and the smooth string-section writing characteristic of the operetta. Gene Kelly gets  happily wet in cinema's most exhilarating downpour. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)  is among the classic examples of the genre to be screened in recent years with concert-hall accompaniments, and this was what the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra offered to a packed Hilbert Circle Theatre Friday night. Jack Everly conducted the orchestra in a re-creation of the instrumental part of the soundtrack, fitting it closely to the voices in Nacio Herb Brown's songs. It was evident from the overture how much of a boost a live orchestra can give to a film good enough to sell itself on its own merits: When the ISO moved on from the title tune to "You Are My Lucky Star," a vaunting cou...

"A Festival of Psalms," a program of choral music to be presented Saturday at Second Presybterian Church, will include the premiere of James Lee III's  "Psalm 111," a commission from Soli Deo Gloria, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization co-founded by John Nelson, fifth music director of the the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (1976-1987). Michelle Louer Soli Deo Gloria's mission is to foster the creation and performance of classical sacred music. Performance of the new work, for chorus and orchestra, will be conducted by Michelle L. Louer,  director of music and fine arts at the church, 7700 N. Meridian St. The free 7 p.m. concert will be preceded at 6:15 by Lee's discussion of the work in the church's Milner Chapel. "Psalm 111" is one of 15 new works to be generated by Soli Deo Gloria's Psalms Project, which is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment. Performing forces at the premiere will be the Sanctuary Choir, Beecher Si...

At the basis of Western literature is one of its most violent books, Homer's "Iliad." The poem's  peculiarly personal way of scrutinizing warfare has influenced the literary treatment of conflict ever since. No way that we get on each other's nerves, no lingering resentment, is too trivial a casus belli , especially where powerful people are involved and can draw thousands into their quarrels. When Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare put together "An Iliad," they were no doubt imagining that epic poem's legacy mainly as a catalogue of wasted lives, with pointless destruction and ungovernable emotions competing against valor and comradeship. So, using Robert Fagles' translation of  "The Iliad," Peterson and O'Hare have made the story of Achilles' wrath during the Greeks' protracted siege of Troy a burden upon the Poet himself, carried for all time. The marvels and horrors that Henry Woronicz relates as the play's only ...

Indianapolis Opera began its 2013-14 season by staging the staunchest anti-opera in the operatic canon, “The Threepenny Opera.” The enduring collaboration of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, despite a difficult gestation, gave a 20 th -century twist to the view from the bottom of English society from which John Gay had written   “The Beggar’s Opera”   two centuries earlier. It was meant to be vernacular in the coarsest way, both musically and textually. As designed by Gordon Strain, the Basile Opera Center production has a severe industrial look — symmetrically designed metal scaffolding with opposing stairways, the whole marked off geometrically with bars and railings. Most of the action takes place in the foreground, where the “alienation effect” of addressing the audience with narration or commentary is thrown in. Tight, circumscribed spots on solo singers from time to time blend the world of stage illusion with cabaret entertainment in Betsy Coopride...

Just missing Verdi's 200th birthday and shy of Krzysztof Urbanski's 31st, this weekend's concerts by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra had a celebratory feeling. As heard Saturday evening at Hilbert Circle Theatre, Verdi's Requiem was so well-performed that its gloomy, anxious message about death, while delivered with suitable pathos, fear and trembling, seemed high on life. A likely atheist, the composer was moved in this work to probe the emotional impact of the Latin Mass for the Dead as well as memorialize a hero of Italian nationalism and art, Alessandro Manzoni, best-known for his novel "I Promessi Sposi." Urbanski showed a well-defined keenness in managing the large forces, not only the substantial orchestra (including offstage trumpets in "Tuba mirum"),  but also the 160-voice Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, prepared to a fare-thee-well by its veteran director, Eric Stark. Eric Barry, tenor soloist Verdi's setting for chorus ...

Much anticipated on a busy musical weekend in Indianapolis was the visit Friday of the Juilliard Quartet , its first return here with its current personnel: violinists Joseph Lin and Ronald Copes, violist Roger Tapping and cellist Joel Krosnick. Juilliard Quartet: standing (from left), Roger Tapping, Ronald Copes and Joseph Lin; seated, Joel Krosnick. Something else was special: Jesse Jones' third string quartet, "Whereof Man Cannot Speak...," received its first performance at the Juilliard's season-opening performance for the Ensemble Music Society .  It was a pleasure to hear such top-notch artists give a world premiere in Butler University's Schrott Center for the Arts , which opened last spring. The new work is a 30-minute episodic setting of the composer's grieving process after his mother's death. Jones individualizes the familiar stages of grief, and he also finds an individual way of casting in abstract musical terms emotions that don't ...

John Berners A thirty-year span of new music, with nothing much in the way of ensemble to spread the focus around, puts a high demand on an audience's attention.  Even when there's humor and theatricality involved, what the University of Indianapolis and guest performers  presented Thursday night as "Working Without a Net: Unaccompanied New Music by Indy Composers" amounted to kind of a staring contest for ears. Here's why: One  performer (usually) onstage, pitted against the ambivalent solitude of each listener in the Wheeler Arts Community Theater in Fountain Square. A rapt audience deserves credit for making possible the most undisturbed presentation of this music's laserlike focus on the navigational and communicative skills of one musician at a time. Though  the six-work program was organized with a keen sense of pace, contrast and flow, I felt a distinct falling off of quality and freshness in what I heard after intermission. A high level of perf...

Monika Herzig talks to IU students in master class with Andre Nendza last week. Several decades ago, according to German jazz bassist Andre Nendza , there were probably just two bassists in Germany capable of playing with such A-list American expatriates as saxophonist Dexter Gordon.  Today, he told me Monday at Central Library , between 50 and 100 bassists in every large German city can play creditably on that level. Nendza testified to this huge growth of jazz competence in Germany as a student ensemble he works with in Cologne, Indianapolis' sister city, prepared to perform, anchored by Nendza on electric bass. Under the supervision of Open Door International program director Hartwig Pruessmann, Nendza and the four students spent a week in Indianapolis and Bloomington. Monday's gig in the spacious Atrium of Central Public Library came toward the end of a Sister Cities sojourn that included taking in a Billy Cobham set at the Jazz Kitchen, performing at ...