Jay Harvey Upstage

Many years ago, the verbally prolific composer Ned Rorem — who's probably never said an unkind word about anyone who advocated for his music — heaped praise on Jerome Lowenthal for showing his generation  that "intellect and fire are the same thing." Lowenthal had played and recorded Rorem's Third Piano Concerto, created on commission for the pianist, to great acclaim. Many other highlights have marked the career of the Philadelphia-born concert artist and teacher, who at 82 brought special distinction to the Music at Shaarey Tefilla series Monday night. It was the star turn of M@ST's 2013-14 season at the Carmel synagogue. The years may have banked Lowenthal's fires somewhat, but the intellect shone through in a program of Jewish composers, from Felix Mendelssohn to George Rochberg. Jerome Lowenthal played music by Jewish composers Intellect in a performer is probably most valuable when the vehicle is not particularly cerebral. That was the case wit

You see this set and you want to go to a party there — though perhaps not this party. My review of "The Game's Afoot" mentioned the jaw-dropping stunner of a set Russell Metheny designed for the production of Ken Ludwig's comedy at Indiana Repertory Theatre. In the course of focusing on the show and the actors, my post didn't linger much over Metheny's work or that of the rest of the team. This was virtuoso-level stuff from stem to stern, and should not be glossed over. The set's exquisite details put across the up-to-date, yet time-traveling splendor in which actor-producer William Gillette, who grew wealthy from his creation of the theatrical Sherlock Holmes, chooses to live. The beautiful display of weaponry over the fireplace is balanced by the opposite wall's most notable — and useful — feature: a false wall that turns 180 degrees when a large lever near the fireplace is pulled to reveal a gorgeous full bar. At Saturday's evening pe

"The Game's Afoot" is a surefooted blend of murder-mystery and farce, and its production to conclude Indiana Repertory Theatre 's 42nd season enjoys the same boisterous groundedness as Ken Ludwig's script. The vanity of actors being almost as notorious as that of people who write about their art,  I shall tread carefully here in reviewing Saturday's second performance. This is a play about players and their world. Even at leisure, they are chock-full of what they do for a living. But they are not free of grubby motives that have nothing to do with art. That's Ludwig's playground here. Under Peter Amster's direction, there's an elaborate display of conviction in each character. The cast is serious about their shenanigans: When they lie and deceive and display their vanity, they do it with the gusto of both inhabiting the characters and being familiar with life in the theater. Ludwig zeroes in on the eminence of William Gillette, who gained

The third element of Butler ArtsFest 's  alliterative title received its due Friday night at the Schrott Center. We've had "Fables" and "Fairy Tales" (the latter theme continues with two more performances of Butler Ballet's "Cinderella" at Clowes Hall). Now it's time for "Physics" to take a turn. The 2014 "Fables, Fairy Tales and Physics" series — the second annual festival — entered its "Encore Weekend" with an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concert called "Quantum: Music at the Frontier of Science." The program devised by guest conductor Edwin Outwater,  with the assistance of quantum physicist Raymond LaFlamme, who offered off-the-cuff elucidation from the stage to supplement written narration delivered by Stacy A. O'Reilly of Butler's chemistry faculty. Outwater also contributed some oral program notes, so the position of words in the program was indispensable. A thorough attempt wa

Some maestro-prone tactical errors notwithstanding, Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra fully deserve to be restored to each other after an unprecedented interruption of a great symphonic ensemble's history by those entrusted with its operation. There will be ample support of this viewpoint from those lucky enough to enjoy the orchestra at home and on tour with Vanska on the podium. The rest of us must be content to nod in agreement on the evidence of broadcasts and recordings. A new release of the top two C-minor piano concertos in the classical tradition, with soloist Yevgeny Sudbin, offers impressive confirmation. Two C-minor piano concertos display Vanska/Minnesota aplomb. Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and Mozart's No. 24 (K. 491) were recorded in 2011 and 2012, the last sessions coming within a few months of the near-disastrous lockout. The release, on the Swedish BIS label, is available on the orchestra's website. Beethoven was an explicit admire

Flourishing under the artistic direction of Dutch early-music star Barthold Kuijken, the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra has now confirmed its imposing stature on disc with "All Hail Barthold Kuijken is soloist and director of "All Hail the Sun King." the Sun King: Music Inspired by the Court at Versailles" (IndieBarock).  The idea is to trace the influence of the French baroque style as exemplified in its golden age (during the reign of Louis XIV) by Jean-Baptiste Lully — mainly in France, but also (particularly as one of his early influences) in the work of Georg Philipp Telemann. Lully, the native Italian who became the fountainhead of music at the French court, opens the disc with two excerpts from "Armide" — a majestic, then dancing, Ouverture followed by a deft exercise in variation form, Passacaille, notable in this performance for the velvet flute timbre. Kuijken is featured as soloist in Jean-Marie Leclair's Concerto in C major for f

Young jazz players may hone their improvisational skills on tunes known to their predecessors and teachers, but when it comes to stepping out on their own, many newcomers these days are founding their artistry almost solely on their own compositions. Given their compositional serioiusness, they are reaching instrumentally and sometimes formally in the direction of the classical genre, while remaining jazz musicians. This is a new wrinkle in jazz history, something a little more fluid and less awkward than the "Third Stream" music of four decades ago. Respect for the current developments has been extended from the classical direction, too; after all, Charles Mingus never received a commissioning grant from Chamber Music America. This practice unites extensive musical forethought with spontaneity to raise the creative profile of musicians trying to make their mark. Here are three whose new recordings will stand or fall on perceptions of what kind of bandleaders and original

"There are definitions of various passions, mostly based on a competitive view of life; for instance, laughter is sudden glory."                        -- Bertrand Russell, describing Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" in "A History of Western Philosophy" (1945) Thomas Hobbes got it right about laughter. In the long history of attempts to define humor and scrutinize what makes us laugh, this almost offhand sentence in the middle of Lord Russell's long discussion of Hobbes' philosophy is the best I've come across. Why there should be this odd vocal, physical expression of a particular type of joy is puzzling. "Sudden glory" gets it, it seems to me. It explains  why comedy — however fiercely loyal we are to our peculiar preferences — is often vulgar, impolite, offensive, aggressive and, finally, necessary. Laughter is also bonding, like hardly any other common mode of communication besides prayer, than which it is probably mo

There's no underestimating the risks Katori Hall assumed in writing a play about Martin Luther King Jr.'s last hours on Earth. "The Mountaintop" — now at Indiana Repertory Theatre through April 27 — tackles more than a martyred historical figure many people regard with reverence. The young minister who defined the American civil-rights movement and established the value of nonviolent protest as an agent of social change is almost inadequately defined by the cliche "larger than life." Camae (Tracey N. Bonner) bemuses Martin Luther King Jr. (David Alan Anderson). And yet drama has to right-size even heroes to effect a genuine emotional exchange between actors and spectators. Ms. Hall has done that with determination: Her MLK comes onstage with a weakness for cigarettes, raging semi-jocularly at Ralph David Abernathy to bring him some Pall Malls.  He soon displays  a susceptibility to female charms, as well as fear of thunderstorms and the FBI (both

David Kim participated throughout, and his contributions were vital. You could tell from the way David Kim and Rohan De Silva played the Gavotte with Two Variations in Igor Stravinsky's "Suite Italienne" that the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis ' annual collaborative concert with the Ronen Chamber Ensemble would be something special. The opening piece on the concert Thursday night did not involve the durable chamber-music organization co-directed by David Bellman and Ingrid Fischer-Bellman. But the quality of the guest artists helped ensure that the rising tide of Kim and De Silva would lift all musical boats. The audience that nearly filled the Basile Theater at the Indiana History Center seemed to agree by the time the concert wrapped up with Erno Dohnanyi's Sextet in C major for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet and horn. That one Stravinsky movement had an adroit blend of 18th-century poise and 20th-century modernist detachment. T

Takacs Quartet made a return visit to focus on Bela Bartok. Some works of art seem to address what the time of their creation needs and expresses, as well as what suits the personality and artistic development of their creators. The six string quartets of Bela Bartok are certainly representative of that truth for the early 20th century. They have outlived their time, of course, to become among the permanent glories of the repertoire. Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center, the Takacs Quartet played three of them. The concert was the season finale of the Ensemble Music Society, whose services to classical music in Indianapolis are unique and enduring. The quartet, now in residence at the University of Colorado, was formed in Budapest in 1975; two original members remain, second violinist Karoly Schranz and cellist Andras Fejer. Bartok (1881-1945) emerged from the shadow of late Romanticism, with an early overlay of Debussyan impressionism, to forge an original kind of m

If the way they performed together Monday night is any indication, the music faculty of the University of Indianapolis is a most harmonious group. I will not inquire too closely what goes on at their faculty meetings in order to preserve my pleasant notion of a "peaceable kingdom" reigning over the DeHaan Fine Arts Center. The "Season Finale" concert was probably a public display of an estimable rapport among musicians associated with the department through full- and part-time teaching there. Three musicians: Anne McCafferty, Harry Miedema, Anne Reynolds. That's not to omit Nick Tucker, one of the stellar graduates of UIndy's jazz program, which has been shepherded into eminence by Harry Miedema, who retires at the end of the current school year.  A tenor saxophonist of wide professional experience before getting into academia, Miedema has consistently raised the visibility and substance of jazz education at the Southside school. To boost its public

Launched into prominence by the golden boost of the 2013 American Pianists Association Classical Fellowship, Sean Chen is back in Indianapolis this weekend to indicate — not that anyone needed more evidence — that his victory here was no fluke. Sean Chen showed his good taste with a reflective Bach encore. The vehicle is Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, in two Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performances with German conductor Christoph Konig on the podium at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Chen displayed crisp articulation through the thickets of figuration and octaves in the outer movements, with the addition of expressive insight that seemed to freshen up the familiar work. His tone in the "Andantino semplice" had a rare refinement for a young player, and the effect was mesmerizing, especially with the contrast offered by the frantic waltz in the middle. It was well-coordinated with scurrying strings by Konig. The finale had a rhythmic liveliness th

Last Sunday afternoon at Butler Artsfest, a lucky audience heard a splendid performance of George Crumb's 1974 "Music for a Summer Evening." The Devil (as lepidopterist) sizes up the fiddling Soldier in Butler production. But the festival was by no means finished so soon with modern and contemporary works: In the jazz sphere, there will be Donny McCaslin's appearance with the university's jazz ensemble Saturday night. That morning, the Butler Percussion Ensemble, true to the heart of the all-percussion repertoire, will go all modern. Unlike some arts festivals, this one is not wedded to the distant past. The weekend was heralded Thursday by a program partnering a work by Butler Jordan College of the Arts dean Ronald Caltobiano with Igor Stravinsky's First World War fable, "The Soldier's Tale." Tonight, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra comes into the spotlight with a program including the premiere of James Aikman's "Triptych: M

Handling difficult issues on the musical stage rests on the pop-culture heritage of a genre once called "musical comedy." There have been many examples of earnestness in the genre since Rodgers and Hammerstein shocked 1949 audiences in "South Pacific" with a bitter indictment of prejudice in the song "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught." And of course, a generation later,  there's the onset of a whole society's moral ruin that pervades "Cabaret." Imagine the difficulty of staying on the side of good taste, not to mention upholding the expectations of entertainment, by pitching your creative tent in the middle of the most famous episode of mass horror in modern history — and singing about it. Deborah Haber has brought to light her family history of struggle to emerge from the Holocaust in "Moses Man," a new musical given a staged reading at Indiana Repertory Theatre Wednesday night. The cast of the staged reading  at

The moon has long been associated with romantic waxings and wanings. In "The World on the Moon," the allure of Earth's satellite takes advantage of naive, pseudo-scientific curiosity to overcome obstacles to young love. Ecclitico (right) gets Buonafede to see what he sees. Joseph Haydn's 1777 comic opera is an ornament of the current Artsfest at Butler University. In Tuesday's 11 p.m. performance, what is normally bedtime for people my age became a surprisingly welcome wake-up call to delight. The singing was largely first-rate, the characters enthusiastically embodied and the comic energy and sense of style unrelenting. Holcomb Observatory's planetarium room is the cozy setting for this production, which has two more performances today (6 and 8:30 p.m.). Among the wonders of the show is the fluidity and eloquence of William Fisher's direction of the cast — with space at a perilous premium, given the dominating central position of the planetarium.

In more than 40 years of reviewing performances, I have sometimes frustrated presenters by not being particularly "blurbable." It's not because I'm a dyspeptic reviewer, which would mean who besides a masochist would want to quote me? No, that's not it: I like so much of what I attend that one of the volunteer workers at the Indy Fringe Fest has complained to me: "Do you like EVERYTHING?" On the other hand, some readers over the years have insisted they couldn't tell from the review if I liked a particular show or not. Occasionally when they can tell, and they liked the event less than I did, I get something like: "You were too kind." It doesn't come across as a compliment, though kindness normally gets lots of lip service. In many a review, I may register my caveats and disappointments along the way, but even my thoroughly positive responses too often lack a phrase that could be pulled out and used to encourage people to buy tic