Jay Harvey Upstage

With the music director taking off the middle week of "Fantasy, Fate and War: A Midwinter Russian Music Festival," a near-exact contemporary of his mounts the podium of the Hilbert Circle Theatre to conduct works by Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. Han-Na Chang makes her ISO debut. Han-Na Chang is also a colleague of Krzysztof Urbanski's on the artistic side of the Trondheim (Norway) Symphony Orchestra. After making a sensation as a precocious concert cellist, the South Korean musician switched to conducting in her late teens, and most of the 32-year-old maestra's career has been devoted to wielding the baton. Since last season, Chang has been principal guest conductor at Trondheim, where Urbanski was appointed chief conductor in 2010. On Friday night, Chang made her Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra debut. She showed herself to be a thoroughly schooled conductor with pinpoint control over what the musicians in front of her were doing. In Tchaikovsky's Symphony ...

"He that hath ears to hear, let him ear."  -- Jesus This is the first blog post I've ever opened with an epigraph from the Bible, but it seems fitting when addressing "A Love Supreme," the John Coltrane masterpiece that enabled him to set a seal upon his spiritual journey away from addiction and his musical journey away from standard musical forms. Rob Dixon plays "A Love Supreme" (photo by Mark Sheldon) And the quote also applies to the importance of the tenor saxophonist's outreach to listeners. He was not the only musician in the post-bop era to see the need to reverse the narrowing of the jazz fan base. But he was the most suited to the task — at least in this ambitious sense: "When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups." Evidence is that the 1965 recording indeed reached well beyond the typical jazz audience, and in fact...

For about six years, Zach Lapidus brought his own Portlandia vibe, transmuted and refined by an Indiana University jazz education , to the Indianapolis music scene — with wonderful results. I think I first heard him with Frank Glover outdoors on an electric piano at Eagle Creek Park.  The pleasant setting was far from ideal for appreciating a new player, but Lapidus struck me as someone special. From promise to mastery: Zach Lapidus conveys certainty and adventure. Twice during his time here (2008-2014), he was chosen to be a finalist for the Jazz Fellowship Awards, competing for the title of Cole Porter Fellow of the American Pianists Association . The second time was for the current competition, at which I was one of the preliminary judges. Saturday night was my first chance to hear any of the finalists in the Premiere Series of trio performances at the Jazz Kitchen . One more series concert in the same club setting remains — Kris Bowers' on Feb. 28. The whole series ...

 

Following the Super Bowl, New England Paidtotryit Coach Bill Hellichecked is slated to take on a new role — in a production of GoOnDoused's delightful operetta "Deflater Mouse." Coach points the way toward an operatic turn. It will be the controversial coach's debut on the opera stage,  the Pretentious Roman Numeral Opera Company producer-director announced at a news conference yesterday. "Are you sure you've found the rat singer for the role?" a famed sports columnist asked incredulously. "I'm sure I can count on you to puntificate about this, Mr. Doyel a la Carte," said the impresario, emphasizing the prefix. "You'll do it with your usual savoy-fair, of course.  You've had us at fourth down so many times, but we're not as detached from reality as you might think: We've got good field position; we're first-and-tenuto." "But can Helichecked even sing?" another reporter asked the grim ex-...

You can depend upon a jazz group like Icarus Ensemble   to grow artistically as a matter of course: Its members have such a wide range of musical influences and active involvement with the classical tradition that the quintet's continuing creativity is assured. Mark Ortwein (from left), Peter Hansen, Deane Franke, Gary Walters, Jon Crabiel The band's internal rapport naturally grows with experience together, even though they are pulled in many other directions as teachers and performers (three of them as members of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra ). In a generous first set Monday night at the Jazz Kitchen, Icarus sounded better than ever. The five musicians are trained in preparing concerts conscientiously. But what's more important to convey a genuine jazz feeling is an informality and spontaneity that can advance the collegial conversation. After the group's pianist, Gary Walters, opened with a solo tribute to the late Cynthia Layne ("Sophisticated...

It's rare for musical compositions based on the biblical Book of Psalms to be free of verbal references. But Matt Pivec , Butler University 's director of jazz studies, links his purely instrumental music on "Psalm Songs" to his fondness for that book — so extravagant in its intimate communication with God, so dependent on turning devotion into enduring words of praise and complaint. Not necessarily, Pivec seems to be saying with his saxophones and all-star rhythm section, His brief booklet note with this 2013 recording links his inspiration to the Psalms' references to the natural world "in all its dimensions — power, beauty, destruction, creation, strength and fragility." Quite a burden for a jazz record to bear without sounding strained and pretentious! But the saxophonist and his colleagues on this project are straightforward, focused, imaginative, and nimble  throughout the seven tunes. From the outset, in "As Far As the East," it'...

We spend our lives in and around enclosed, manmade structures without thinking very much about how buildings mold and direct our physical selves. Diavolo, the dance company from Los Angeles whose tour stopped at the Tarkington this weekend, makes art out of that relationship. The program subtitle attached to the troupe’s name — “Architecture in Motion” — opens up the possibilities.   Buildings rock, it turns out — and not just in earthquakes, but in our internalized experience of them. The final moments of Diavolo's "Fluid Infinities" Human techniques of both movement and structure blend toward artistic harmony in Diavolo’s work. Large set pieces, as virtuosic and unconventional as the performers’ interaction with them, are an integral element of the choreography. As one of the dancers said in a Q&A session after Friday’s performance, “the set is our 11 th dancer.” Each work is developed from the concept of Jacques Heim, Diavolo’s founder-direc...

Kate Boyd, associate professor of piano, Butler University Anticipation of a Butler University professor's solo piano recital undoubtedly built all the more after illness forced postponement of her scheduled December performance to Tuesday night. The 140-seat Eidson-Duckworth Recital Hall was filled by the time Kate Boyd opened her program with Schubert's Sonata in A major, D. 664, op. 120 (the "little" or "lesser" A major, as it's sometimes known). In its new position, the recital gave immediate stature to the post-holiday resumption of the city's classical-music season. Boyd's fitness for an expressively challenging program was nearly immaculate. She imaginatively shaped both parts of the recital: the Schubert sonata anticipating Alban Berg's in the first half; a Chopin group of A-flat major pieces foreshadowing Sergei Prokofiev's wartime masterpiece, Sonata No. 7 in B-flat major, after intermission. The slight awkwardness of...

Margie (Constance Macy) asks her boss, Stevie (Nick Abeel), for another chance. National awareness of South Boston probably peaked in the mid-'70s, when court-ordered school integration met its most agonizing Northern test and exposed angry resentment that a community's cohesion was apparently being sacrificed for a doomed social experiment. David Lindsay-Abaire's "Good People" doesn't restrict itself to the aspects of "Southie" resistance that can glibly be ascribed to white racism. The play, which opened Friday at Indiana Repertory Theatre , instead focuses on an American dilemma even more intractable: the traps of social class in a society that prides itself on classlessness. The largely Irish-American neighborhoods of a city long in the grip of patrician Yankees have a history that tends to confine them to the working class and its rough-and-tumble power struggles. With less social mobility than  ever before, America is in danger of setti...

Score one for any spouse who can end a marital spat by saying to his partner: You're not so special. You're the least special person I know. That's the effective tactic Javier employs in defusing his pregnant wife's articulate tantrum about the decidedly mixed joys of biracial status in America today. In "River City," a poignant comedy by Diana Grisanti that opened Thursday night in a Phoenix Theatre production, Mary is determined to give birth in the Louisville of the title as part of her quest to reconnect with family roots. She sees being considered "special" — a designation reflexively employed by her adoring white mother, Ruth — as a burden that separates her from her black side. Javier and Mary have issues to negotiate. Her recently deceased father, whom she barely knew, has left behind some puzzling mementos, and she feels rootless in Chicago, where Javier is making a name for himself as a trendy master of  Mexican cuisine. In Louisv...