Jay Harvey Upstage

To the casual American music-lover, the Finnish contribution to classical music is usually summed up in the work of Jan Sibelius. But the cultivation of music in Finland over many decades since Sibelius has produced a wealth of worthy successors, as well as superb players and conductors nurtured by the nation's outstanding music education. Jaakko Kuusisto was one of the 1994 laureates. Monday night in the Laureate Series of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Jaakko Kuusisto furthered our acquaintance with this phenomenon. A laureate in the 1994 IVCI, he has amassed many other honors since, including impressive credits as a composer and conductor in addition to his violin-playing. The first half of the violinist's program at the Indiana History Center was all Finnish, starting with the founding father, Sibelius (1865-1957). Five Danses Champetres , played with Chih-Yi Chen at the piano, made for an expansive curtain-raiser as well as a charming exposit...

"America's diva,"  soprano Renee Fleming, will highlight the new season of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra , in the annual Gala Opening concert. In both the classical and pops series, 2017-18 will feature an A-list roster of debuting and returning guest artists. Renee Fleming will grace the Opening Night Gala concert in her ISO debut. With music director Krzysztof Urbanski on the podium, Fleming will make her ISO debut on Sept. 23, performing pieces that were not part of today's announcement. She is the type of American opera star that Americans like — personable, down-to-earth, and versatile. If opera had quite the cachet it had in the mid- to late 20th century, hers would probably be a household name, as was the beloved Beverly Sills. But Fleming moved closer to that exalted status when she sang the national anthem at the 2014 Super Bowl. In her principal claim to fame on the opera stage, Fleming established her reputation a few decades ago with acclaim...

Alex Beyer put a personal stamp on a varied program Sunday afternoon. It's expected that the American Pianists Awards in classical music will present pianists fully capable from a technical standpoint. And it's even the norm that appropriate interpretive ideas will be applied to the repertoire, even if they amount to no more than conventional wisdom. But it always seems a gift when yet another finalist comes along with a real personality to express in the Premiere Series recital/concerto format. Personality is always a treacherous quality to assess in an art form so dependent on tradition. It can be summed up as the ability to project an individualized approach to the music that brings its essence forward without distortion, misreading or sensationalism. That's what Alex Beyer rewarded a sizable audience with in the Indiana History Center's Basile auditorium Sunday afternoon. Amply recognized internationally already, the 22-year-old Beyer exhibited an incisive ...

Richard Smagur as the defiant, isolated fisherman Peter Grimes. In an especially poignant passage in Alban Berg's "Wozzeck," an opera Benjamin Britten admired and pondered while composing "Peter Grimes," the title character  muses aloud that when he and others of his class enter heaven, they will probably have to lend a hand with the thunder. He's a common soldier dominated by a nagging captain and a crackpot doctor, and like Grimes, he's destined for a tragic end. But Britten's hero thinks very little about his fate in heaven, and regards thunder and its attendant meteorological challenges as well beyond his control, either in this life or the one to come. That's conventional wisdom for seafaring communities. The rough fisherman that librettist Montagu Slater fashioned from the sadist in George Crabbe's poem "The Borough" finds the suspicion he arouses in his fellow citizens as implacable as any natural foe. He is less deserv...

The Labeque Sisters wowed the crowd in Poulenc's two-piano concerto The pre-eminent duo pianists of the day excited the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra audience Friday night in the only full-length performance of this weekend's Classical Series program. The schedule yields to the music of Queen tonight, but last evening Rossen Milanov reigned over a concert of music by Toru Takemitsu, Francis Poulenc, and P.I. Tchaikovsky at Hilbert Circle Theatre. The Bulgarian conductor, now music director of the Columbus (Ohio) Symphony Orchestra,  opened with the Japanese composer's quarter-hour evocation of an imaginary garden rooted in his love of real ones. "A Flock Descends Into the Pentagonal Garden" offers a wide spectrum of orchestral sonority, distantly derivative of Debussy's manner of prioritizing sound and avoiding cadences and development. Forging a style of his own, Takemitsu, who died 21 years ago,  represented the first internationally successful ble...

Joe Lovano, looking like the chairman of the board. Coming into the Jazz Kitchen on a beautiful unseasonably balmy Saturday evening to hear the Joe Lovano Quartet provided a layer of further relief. The early set by the veteran saxophonist dispensed not only balm, however, but also a bracing sort of liniment that stung before it soothed. An older sax master, Sonny Rollins, offered a musical caution about global warning several years ago. But sometimes you just have to enjoy the late winter gift of 60-degree temperatures, set aside thoughts of planetary danger, and just take in the music. Lovano's protean style and wealth of invention skirts the edge of glibness, but there's always enough in his solos and the unity he has nurtured in his bands over the years to keep the music fresh. With a short introductory cadenza as a kind of throat-clearing, Lovano and the band launched into some bluesy oratory with the leader's composition "Fort Worth." Now, Fort W...

Realizing that I was out of town when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra last played Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat ("Eroica"), I unfortunately can't comment on how different Friday night's performance under the baton of Edo de Waart was Edo de Waart, this weekend's guest conductor. compared to Mario Venzago's in 2014. But it was soon evident as the first movement got under way at Hilbert Circle Theatre that de Waart was drawing something of significant contrast to the Beethoven styles of Krzysztof Urbanski,  Venzago, or Raymond Leppard — the current ISO music director and his two immediate predecessors. I've never heard the ISO sound quite like this in core classical repertoire, and it's almost frustrating to try pinpointing the differences, which were all to the good. There was a glow and warmth to the first movement that avoided overheating. The sound was full and commanding, without excessive upholstery. In "The Symphony: ...

Not sure what the technical glitch (clearly intentional on the part of the Phoenix Theatre tech team) was that gave an opening-night audience "legendary local character actor" Scot Greenwell as an emanation, or incarnation, or embodiment of God Himself in "An Act of God" Thursday night. You'll have to forgive me for my confusion on how to describe the substitution. Human theological language is mostly opaque to me. I should say right off that, coincidentally, I was there as a representative of regular blog critic Jay Harvey. As an angel, though not among the higher orders — my application to either Dominions or Thrones is under consideration — I am pretty well qualified to stand in for any human observer of the celestial scene. I daresay Harvey cannot make that claim. First off, I have to declare that David Javerbaum, the author of "An Act of God," has some startling insights and intuitions about Himself. You can see for yourself on weekends throug...

Butler's Wingfield family in "The Glass Menagerie" Background music is part of the scenario Tennessee Williams stipulates in "The Glass Menagerie," the 1945 drama that made his reputation. In Butler University' s production of the play, the overheard accompaniment varied in appropriateness; there were some puzzling anachronisms. But particularly exact and evocative of both the era and the mood was Billie Holiday's recording of "Crazy He Calls Me," played before the first words came from the stage. The romantic devotion the song addresses is never realized by anyone in the Wingfield household in a lower-middle-class apartment in St. Louis. But the fierce wistfulness of the family matriarch, Amanda, is caught particularly in these lines:  "The difficult I'll do right now / The impossible will take a little while." Wounded by the early departure of her handsome husband and the father of her now-adult children, Laura and Tom...

Duchess is a vocal trio whose vocal discipline never smothers its direct appeal. Jazz vocalists who push scatting and vocalese (new lyrics on old tunes and solos) to the sidelines are fairly rare, particularly when they combine in groups. Thus Duchess , which on the recorded evidence has a keen jazz sensibility, also draws on an old pop tradition represented by the Andrews Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, and the Mills Brothers. In the trio's second recording, "Laughing at Life" ( Anzic Records ), the blend is seamless and invigorating. Projecting the lyrics with verve and clarity seems to be a watchword with Amy Cervini, Hilary Gardner and Melissa Stylianou. At the same time, they negotiate clever arrangements with agility and true pitch. The tempo shifts in "Everybody Loves My Baby" are thrilling, particularly with a couple of lickety-split choruses (to Duchess lyrics)  that are the last word in precision. This song also enjoys idiomatic help from clarine...

Born in Tel Aviv and trained in jazz on a scholarship to the New School, Yotam Silberstein has been a rising star on the "The Village" is Yotam Silberstein's fifth recordings as a leader. international jazz scene for about a decade. Like many Israeli jazz players who've become known in the West, Silberstein is unusually open to making the music truly multicultural in addition to putting a personal stamp on it. It sounds entirely natural and inevitable the way he goes about it. On "The Village" ( Jazz+People ) he has the advantage of putting his fleet, melodic guitar style into a thoroughly compatible quartet context. His pianist, Aaron Goldberg, is often paired with Silberstein on this disc in unison statements of the tunes, most of them originals. The partnership is subject to all kinds of steeplechase challenges, in songs like Carlos "Negro" Aguirre's "Milonga Gris," Lennie Tristano's "Lennie Bird" (a "Ho...

Ingrid and Christine Jensen commit to a personal outlook with "Infinitude." "How are we going to dive into his pool and swim together?" is the question Christine Jensen posed on behalf of herself and sister Ingrid as they approached the small-group CD project that's just been issued: "Infinitude" ( Whirlwind Recordings ). The Canadian sisters — saxophonist and trumpeter, respectively — in fact keep their heads above water, and dive deep when they feel like it, in these ten tunes, most of them originals. To continue the water analogy, however, there is some drifting toward the end of the CD. So I re-listened to "Infinitude" in a couple of separate sessions to make sure it wasn't just my attention that was drifting in the last few tunes. I want to get the discouraging words out of the way quickly, because I believe "Infinitude" presents a fresh, unified vision, with an intimacy that would be evident even if this quintet...

So 20th century: Leonard Ganz  and Chris Gorman try to consult a doctor. Falsehoods seem to be in full flower these days. But who's pointing fingers? In "Rumors," Neil Simon puts concatenations of lying, innuendo, and "fake news" through close-order drill. There's no larger message here, because the community that comes under scrutiny is merely a daft selection of well-connected, well-off New York City people trying to squelch an embarrassing event: the attempted suicide of the city's deputy mayor. In 2017, public embarrassment may have become as passe as telephones with cords on them. The spiraling black cord on the cast page of Civic Theatre's "Rumors" explicitly acknowledges the quaintness of Simon's farce. It's kind of charming to take a look into the not-so-distant past and realize how dependent so many cultural artifacts are on the restricted ways people once communicated. (I find the ruse that the singer of Irving Ber...

Dance Kaleidoscope lives up to its name in a particularly focused way with its current show, "Divas." There are choreographic interpretations of a kaleidoscope of female pop vocalists spread over a generously proportioned show. Seen Thursday night at Indiana Repertory Theatre, "Divas" offers a welcome return visit to the short pieces workshopped at the Indy Fringe Festival last August. Each of the nine was created by a DK dancer in tribute to a different entertainer, as represented by one recorded song. The production's second half presents extended views of Janis Joplin (by artistic director David Hochoy) and Aretha Franklin (by Nicholas Owens), using their recordings of several songs each. This should be a wildly popular show, if only because  memories of this music are so strong with so many people. I come at these recorded songs with faint familiarity, on the whole, and try to get as much enlightenment about the various styles and attractiveness of these...