Jay Harvey Upstage

Elsewhere I have expressed my dismay that the Supreme Court last Friday leaped into settling a question that ought to have been resolved among the voters and their elected representatives. Despite that, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision holds out the promise of a society I will be happier to live in. In contemplating the future, in which committed same-sex relationships (one of them close to me, and of 35 years' standing) will have legal sanction, a fascinating sidebar in the New York Times' coverage was a feature on how gay culture will have to change, perhaps in ways that are poignant and a little alarming to those within it. It's not my place to assess the potential for stress on the social bonds within the gay community, once same-sex marriage goes mainstream. But the situation reminds me, looking on as a sympathetic outsider, of similar stresses that threatened social cohesion among African-Americans with the decline of segregation (still in many ways a de facto r...

The Indianapolis Early Music Festival took a "Roman holiday" on a rain-soaked central Indiana evening Friday, welcoming the baroque trio Aeris (with guests Charles Weaver, guitar and chitarrone, and Nell Snaidas, soprano) for a program of Handel "the Wanderer" and some Italian contemporaries  with one close predecessor. (Bad weather had led the I ndianapolis Symphony Orchestra to cancel its Symphony on the Prairie concert; the program is scheduled to be performed tonight.) Aeris is focused on music of the Italian baroque. The New York trio specializes in the Italian baroque, with its florid and moody inspiration and its vivid melodic and rhythmic character.  It's not hard to see how this sort of music stirred the young Handel, who went on to flourish in Italian opera (staged in England) and English oratorios. America's "Messiah" mania has tended to obscure the breadth of this achievement, but in recent years more attention has been paid to ...

  News item: Apple withdraws Civil War games from sale over Confederate flag sensitivity. http://toucharcade.com/…/06/25/apple-removes-confederate-f…/ Photograph of Abraham Lincoln late in life shows the strain on him of having to pretend there was a Civil War going on. Hoople, ND -- Apple's decision to pull Civil War games from online availability turns out to have better historical grounding than it may appear, according to a couple of historians on the faculty of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.  The two professors have concluded after years of exhaustive research that the American Civil War in fact never took place. Astonished by this revelation, I spoke to the scholars -- Wright S. Raine and Ambrose Truelove -- by phone earlier today. "Professor Raine," I began, "how can you possibly overturn decades of scholarship, including an abundance of primary documents and photographs, ...

Guest conductor Fawzi Haimor was born in Chicago. The tempestuous virtuosity of Armenian pianist Nareh Arghamanyan held an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra audience spellbound Thursday afternoon as the second annual  "Lunch Break" series, now expanded to six concerts, presented some familiar Tchaikovsky to music-lovers in Hilbert Circle Theatre. Fawzi Haimor, resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, was on the podium for the second concert in the series. Both guest artists will appear in two Symphony on the Prairie concerts this weekend, collaborating on the same work. In addition, the Mussorgsky-Ravel "Pictures at an Exhibition" will be performed under Haimor's direction. Nareh Arghamanyan put her stamp on Tchaikovsky. The sole "Lunch Break" piece was everybody's favorite Russian composer's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. It was a warhorse long before Van Cliburn made it even better-known after his competitio...

DM Jazz Eight: Moving smartly into Rich Dole's arrangement of a Johnny Hodges number. Hearing the first set of the eight-month-old ensemble co-led by Gene Markiewicz and Rich Dole Wednesday night offered indications of bright promise at the Jazz Kitchen. The DM Jazz Eight is an octet (duh!) with this instrumentation: two saxes, two trumpets, one trombone, and the conventional rhythm section (piano, bass, drums). The band largely uses a book left by former Indianapolis valve-trombonist-bandleader Phil Allen , supplemented by several Dole arrangements. I came in as the band was setting out with Duke Ellington's "In a Mellotone," creating a relaxed groove featuring something that immediately appealed to me: trumpeter Larry McWilliams plunger-soloing crisp phrases behind the ensemble.  He has the perfect instincts for this kind of texture, and something similar came through later as the band played Dole's arrangement of Johnny Hodges' "Fur Piece....

Cultural clashes often beget cultural amalgamation and new syntheses that are impossible to imagine without one cherished tradition rubbing up against another. Montreal-based Ensemble Caprice is led by Matthias Maute (second from right). Ensemble Caprice, a Montreal group led by charismatic recorder player Matthias Maute, explored the theme here Sunday with particular emphasis on the 16th- and 17th-century effects on European music of exposure to the New World. With the piquant title of "Salsa Baroque: Music of Latin America and Spain," the six musicians (including soprano guest Esteli Gomez ) presented a smoothly integrated concert to a well-filled Basile Auditorium at the Indiana History Center. It was the second concert in the current Indianapolis Early Music Festival . Maute wove a spoken narrative throughout the program. It had touches of poetry about it, asking the audience to imagine itself facing the adventure of travel to the New World at the dawn of European...

Americans who grew up in the mid- to late 20th century carried a fearful caricature of what Russia had become after social pressures of the 1800s gave birth, midwifed by war, to the global red menace of the Soviet Union. Much of the discreet charm of Anton Chekhov's emerging bourgeoisie and beleaguered aristocracy foreshadows that cataclysm in muted terms. But it took the tolerant, observant temperament of the man Chekhov to produce a play like "The Cherry Orchard," not a convenient set of circumstances tracing the decline of the old order. Masterpieces aren't generated by either social change or the nature of language, despite what cultural theorists of various stripes tell us. EclecticPond Theatre Company's production wisely senses how seamlessly Chekhov placed his awareness of a changing world in the personalities of his characters. As seen Sunday evening at the Basile Opera Center, the performance honored the short-lived Russian playwright's compassio...

Programming that for two weekends has concluded on the glorious heights of D major guarantees that bright key — especially in the giddy rush of the final measures in Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Beethoven's Ninth — a role in sending Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra audiences into the summer with happy memories. Friday night's performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor ("Choral") in a well-filled Hilbert Circle Theatre elicited a predictable shouting and standing ovation, but it was deserved in so many respects that it didn't seem automatic. The audience was clearly also in a mood to enjoy the 20-minute opener, Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 4, which presented the ISO in its most glittering aspect, nicely focused on compact, emotionally appealing music by the conductor's eminent countryman (1913-1994). Krzysztof Urbanski: Tensile strength and insight in Beethoven In the Beethoven, music director Krzysztof Urbanski  drew from the orchestr...

Holliday Park was the setting for a light-classical concert Thursday night by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, which acquitted itself well despite scant rehearsal time under the baton of its new music director, Matthew Kraemer. Indiana native Matthew Kraemer officially begins ICO duties in July. Kraemer will be returning to a community he was well-acquainted with years ago as a Butler University student, graduating before advanced studies at the University of Nevada. He has recently held appointments with the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra (associate conductor) and, in northwestern Pennsylvania, the Erie Chamber Orchestra. Conductors need to talk to audiences more than they used to — particularly in informal settings. On Thursday, Kraemer was good at that, keeping it light and not long-winded.  He was attentive to the orchestra's sound, and smartly saw the need for a tuning pause after Leroy Anderson's "Serenata." He was not all about wowing the crowd in hi...

The quintet that trumpeter Terence Blanchard now leads played the Jazz Kitchen Tuesday night, and it took some getting used to for fans most familiar with Blanchard's lyrical tendency as displayed in acoustic settings. Jazz prides itself on never standing still, so I suppose my somewhat tepid response to the E-Collective (Blanchard, occasionally doubling on keyboard, plus guitar, electric bass, keyboards, and drums) can be chalked up to a bit of moldy-figgery. Terence Blanchard E-Collective plays music from "Breathless." I missed the songful Blanchard, master of smooth elisions through half-valving and sudden shadings of tone. He was always a trumpeter who could reach in a controlled manner for the upper reaches of pitch and volume, never sounding forced, and linking that sound to his gorgeous middle and lower registers. For his first set at the Kitchen, Blanchard and his mates forged an uninterrupted set of just over an hour. I was reminded of a Miles Davis se...

You can get a lot of insight into the open-ended stance of classical music in the early 21st century by listening to "Momentum 21" (Albany), a new compact disc issued to mark the conclusion of Kirk Trevor's l ong tenure as music director of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. The disc is titled after the work that opens the program, "Triptych: Musical Momentum," by composer-in-residence James Aikman.  Recorded at the ICO's home concert hall, the Schrott Center for the Arts at Butler University, "Triptych" is an inviting showcase for the ICO and its rapport with Trevor. Kirk Trevor adds a significant recording to a large discography. The three-movement work opens with a driving Fanfare, which holds something in reserve despite its insistent rhythmic patterns. Wisps of woodwind play off the dominant rhythm, which is punctuated by a hammer hitting a 2-by-4, manned by the timpanist, who gets the composition's last word on his proper ins...

Setting out on the final phase of symphonic creation in his short life, Gustav Mahler returned to a purely instrumental concept for his Symphony in C-sharp minor, which occupies the middle position in his astonishingly personal and trailblazing series of nine completed symphonies. He was motivated in part by a thorough reaquaintance with the music of J.S. Bach, whose unsurpassed skills at making independent "voices" work together (polyphony, or counterpoint) had likewise influenced Mozart's late phase just over a century before. T he fifth symphony is the sole work on this weekend's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra program; The performance I heard Saturday was the first of two repeats of a Krzysztof Urbanski interpretation first presented Friday night at the Palladium in Carmel. The ISO will play it again Sunday afternoon at Center Grove High School in Greenwood as the finale of its 2014-15 "317 Series." I might be tempted to trek down there on the st...

Name recognition alone helps ensure a long life for "Jesus Christ Superstar," the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice 1970 rock opera. The creators built on the gospel story of Jesus' final week, bringing the conflicts to the fore, skirting the theological issues in order to focus on the human drama — internal and external pressures coming to bear upon a charismatic healer and preacher. They dressed it up shrewdly in the lyricism and plugged-in energy derived from "British Invasion" rock's first decade. Judas meets Jesus in the garden in "Jesus Christ Superstar." A production putting forth a claim for  the show's viability opened Friday night at the Marian University Theater, the new home for BOBDIREX shows formerly housed at the Athenaeum downtown. It was there that such productions as "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "Spamalot," and "Hair" established the BOBDIREX brand: lively, sprawling, efferv...

It's sometimes possible to wonder why jazz-rock fusion, and a general takeover of jazz instrumentation by electronic instruments, was ever thought to be a likely successor to acoustic jazz. The bandwagon probably started rolling in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp: recapturing the jazz audience lost when the big bands went into eclipse after World War II. Technology will forever suggest new directions for art, and who can object to that? The problem comes when technology seems to be mandating the changes. Fortunately, though that large audience remains elusive, this particular mandate lost force over the decades since big hair and bell bottoms. Love for instruments that naturally send sound waves in motion into the atmosphere with humans as direct agents has never receded from creative young minds. And these four releases are solid proof of  the attraction of staying relatively unplugged-in. Anat Cohen is the foremost new voice of jazz clarinet. Foremost among recent rec...