Jay Harvey Upstage

Pianist-composer Steve Allee had new music to share Saturday. Steve Allee continues to write some of the most engaging, agreeably knotty pieces on the local jazz scene. There were a number of such compositions — their concentrated swing linked to perky melodies — on the first set he and his adept quintet played Saturday night at the Jazz Kitchen, the successful SoBro nightclub-restaurant run by his son David. The players on hand to enhance the introduction of these pieces are all familiar faces — some of them over decades, others over just a few years. Among them was another bandleader-composer of distinction, saxophonist Rob Dixon, whose featured works had a similar  bounce, elegance, and accessibility. Both men are contributing new pieces inspired by paintings that will be displayed July 19 at an Indy Jazz Fest fundraiser called "Jazz on Canvas." One of them heard Friday night was Dixon's "Ragsdale," named for a local artist and distinguished by a th...

 A septet of unprepossessing-looking  musical gentlemen took the stage for the late-night show Friday at the Jazz Kitchen . They hadn't gone far into the sole set of their club debut before it became obvious the Rad Trads had blown their polite newcomer status all to scatteration. The Rad Trads take care of business at some other gig. They strutted, bounced, and boogied while knocking out straightforward songs in some fairly intricate (memorized) arrangements. They never forgot they were there to entertain: no long solos, no narcissistic displays of instrumental prowess. One song after another, high-octane all the way. They just brought it. Based in New York and newly emerged from the South into the Midwest on an extensive tour, the young band quickly put a stamp  of exuberance on a range of soulful music. Their vocals, distributed mainly among three of them, were punctuated by the band's well-coordinated four horns, resting on a solid foundation of guitar, elec...

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) pointed toward music's postmodern future even as he anticipated the intervening reign of modernism. The Italian pianist-composer, looking back with intensity toward J.S. Bach while bursting with Romantic afflatus, had a mystical idea of the equivalent meaning of all music: "All melodies, heard before or never heard, resound completely and simultaneously — they are themselves the souls of millions of being in millions of epochs." Out the window goes the "historicist" interpretation of music, that it either has to follow the true line of progress, whatever that means, or fall quickly into irrelevance. In defiance of Robert Browning, Busoni's reach may often have exceeded his grasp.  In "The Great Pianists," Harold Schonberg aptly titles his Busoni chapter "Dr. Faust at the Keyboard." Jeni Slotchiver makes common cause with Busoni. Jeni Slotchiver, in the third volume of her "Busoni the Visionary...

A celebratory take on "Wild Rover" in honor of Ireland's historic vote Friday. Posted by Jay Harvey on Sunday, May 24, 2015

Opera in Indianapolis is reaching out in new directions to find an audience that will support it adequately, and "Crescendo" — a musical term that instructs the player(s) to get louder by a more or less extended "less than" sign — expressed the hope the result will be "more than." That was the title of Friday night's program at White River State Park , where Indianapolis Opera and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra joined forces in a concert of mostly familiar excerpts from opera and musical theater — from Rossini through Stephen Schwartz. Kirk Trevor, newly named maestro emeritus of the ICO since his retirement earlier this month after 27 years, conducted. He was in fine fettle, leading more than two dozen numbers, getting estimable results from the orchestra, the Opera chorus, and four apt guest soloists. The sampling was a generous smorgasbord, which could have been just a little skimpier to allow for more spoken context-setting of several of t...

Stability in jazz tends to be looked upon with suspicion. It brings with it the dangers of falling into a John Patitucci at the Jazz Kitchen May 18. rut, which can be defined as a groove that has started gathering cobwebs. John Patitucci is a player who exudes stability of the good sort. His new CD is titled "Brooklyn" in honor of the New York City borough where he was born and raised. He referenced it several times in his second set Monday night at the Jazz Kitchen , to which he brought the "Brooklyn" group. Though he soft-pedaled his faith and his family, the unaccompanied encore he wrote in their honor, "Tesori" (Treasures), put a seal on those values, as did several "God bless you(s)!" he directed at the enthusiastic audience. Further evidence: With his drummer, Brian Blade, Patitucci has been a member for about 15 years of the Wayne Shorter Quartet, which played a concert at the Palladium in March . (Pianist Danilo Perez, another re...

Orchestra music directors' tenures rarely exceed a quarter-century, so when the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and Kirk Trevor concluded his 27th season at the helm of the ensemble Saturday night, the milestone was worth celebrating. Gifts, testimonials, and several champagne toasts highlighted a post-concert reception at the Schrott Center for the Arts, Butler University. Bella Hristova drew upon her heritage in encore. Bella Hristova, laureate of the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, was the soloist for the season-ending concert. She was heard in Nicolo Paganini's sturdy, showy, episodic Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, op. 6. Hristova displayed the virtuoso command the score requires. Her harmonics had a steady sheen, articulation was varied and well laid out, and the interval leaps in the fast movements had a high degree of accuracy.  Her choice of first-movement cadenza was not to my taste — chockful of trills and laborious ornamentation of...

Dramatics that seemed to leave the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra season when Broadway commitments held F. Murray Abraham away from his scheduled narration of Stravinsky's "Soldier's Tale" have come back in another form in this weekend's replacement program. When he plays rather than poses, Johannes Moser hides nothing. Canadian-German cellist Johannes Moser was engaged for Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations and on Friday night delivered an exuberant, stageworthy performance of the piece, with Cristian Macelaru on the podium. The Hilbert Circle Theatre audience went wild at the end, calling Moser back for an encore, the same composer's "Andante cantabile," led by Macelaru conducting the ISO strings. The encore focused on the sweet side of Moser's art. In the scheduled work, various facets of the soloist's exuberant personality came to the fore. Dynamic contrasts were broad, tempo shifts (as in the fifth variation) were expressive,...

David Hochoy's personal imprint on Dance Kaleidoscope is practically synonymous with the company over the past two dozen seasons, but of course it doesn't disappear when he turns over a program to other choreographers. If you attend "The Next Wave" this weekend on the main stage of Indiana Repertory Theatre, you will appreciate the adaptability and fitness of the troupe to four different styles, as expressed by Lucy Bowen McCauley, Stephanie Martinez, Brock Clawson, and Kiesha Lalama. The dancers' adeptness has been honed by Hochoy's meticulous training and his own artistic range. Two years ago, Clawson charmed DK audiences with "Nine," a work that was daring in an odd way, in that it made a dance out of looking at clouds (hence the title, from the joy of being "on Cloud Nine"). That idyllic pastime is best carried out, as nearly everyone remembers, by lying supine — not a conventional dance posture. Clawson showed a gift for giving o...

Michael Schelle howls at the muses in his new Ronen piece. Who else but Michael Schelle would be likely to take the Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus) by an unmarked trail, raising a ruckus and paying personal tributes along the way? While on the mountain, however, the Butler University composer in residence disports himself as he riles the beasts in "The Wolves of Parnassus," the latest of four commissions dating back nearly three decades from the Ronen Chamber Ensemble. Ending its 2014-15 season Tuesday night in Hilbert Circle Theatre's Wood Room, the Ronen premiered the wide-ranging, six-movement piece with exhaustive gusto. Gradus ad Parnassum, a late Baroque treatise on composition much admired by the Viennese classicists, was mentioned by Schelle in oral program notes before the performance. He was pleased to admit violating as many of its precepts as he could manage. Schelle's wolves are pack animals and predators upon musical order, particular...

As Friday's Words on Music pre-concert discussion made clear, there's a lot about the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique to understand in terms of music history and the development of the symphony orchestra. And the work is so explicit about its meaning, thanks in part to the composer's extensive notes, that audiences know what's going on over its 55-minute length and have connected with its thrills for 185 years. Jun Märkl gets under the skin of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique . The interpretation that Jun Märkl fashioned with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as heard Friday in Hilbert Circle Theatre, went beyond that. This was not a performance content with communicating an understanding of the work or underlining its thrills; it wanted you to experience the composer's vision as well, and really get into the composer's venting of his romantic obsession. Märkl has a history of  eliciting performances from the ISO as committed and inspired as any...

No one pined for an encore after the magnificent second half of Ensemble Music 's season finale Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center. But an irreverent cap could have been put on the Ying Quartet concert by a string arrangement of the The Ying Quartet with its usual current personnel old chestnut "There'll Be Some Changes Made." The second half — Schubert's magisterial two-cello string quintet in C — was intact, except for one of the changes. Second violinist Janet Ying has a shoulder injury, leaving two of the founding family members on hand: violist Phillip Ying and cellist David Ying.  Jessica Lee, second violinist of the Johannes Quartet,   sat in for her. A permanent change in the other violin chair is in the offing. First violinist Ayano Ninomiya will leave at the end of the season, to be replaced by Indianapolis' own Robin Scott. Zuill Bailey had a programming notion. And guest cellist Zuill Bailey surprised everyone by stopp...

What a groaning board of rich, recorded musical food I've been digesting recently! The 2014 season of Music at Menlo , a chamber music festival in the San Francisco Bay Area, is available on nine CDs under the title "Around Dvorak." (Each disc sells for $15; the complete boxed set is $110.) The focus is, of course, the down-to-earth Czech master (1841-1904) who helped establish nationalist norms in classical music while upholding the formal and expressive procedures of Romanticism. The "around" in the title allows the repertoire to blossom on the theme of influences and milieus relevant to the beloved composer's work. The performances are first-rate; the sound quality, pristine. Careful editing means there is no applause to listen to again and again. After some of these performances, that ovation was probably immediate and ecstatic. But it's better that you can listen to the nine discs as if they were studio recordings. The theme is imaginatively c...

Ensemble brio and precision contribute mightily to the show's success. The Monty Python troupe of enduring legend never thought it needed to confine itself to one satirical target at a time. Its style, which to describe as "unbuttoned" would be an understatement, is permanently enshrined in the musical that alumnus Eric Idle created after "Monty Python's Flying Circus" left the airwaves and a few uproarious films had been made. One of them, "Monty Python and the the Holy Grail," is the basis for the Broadway show Idle concocted with the tunesmithing assistance of John Du Prez. Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre is into the second weekend of a three-weekend run  at its home base, the Tarkington at Carmel's Center for the Performing Arts. Friday's performance, with musical direction by Brent E. Marty keeping the peppy pit band and the singers coordinated, set the pulse racing from the overture onward into the show's pseudo-false start...

Playwright-in-residence Tom Horan 's new work, 'Typhoid Mary," moves the Phoenix Theatre 's season-long emphasis on comedy right to the theme's bitter edge. There are laughs to be had in the concise two-act play, to be sure. And the post-modernist style — balanced on the narrative validity of both realism and fantasy in a seriocomic blend — allows us to keep the terror of long-ago epidemic fears at bay. But as seen Thursday night, this is still a scary, emotionally wrenching piece of work, directed in its premiere production by Bill Simmons. Reminders of the Ebola scare come to mind; unfortunately, political polarization helped stoke the recent panic, but comparisons inevitably beg to be made. The extra boost of notoriety in the turn-of-the-20th-century case of the Irish immigrant Mary Mallon (quickly tagged as Typhoid Mary) was her asymptomatic status. This gave her an immunity she took for a sign of grace. Not inclined to trust science (a reluctance still wid...