Jay Harvey Upstage

The Big Bang Theory applied to the string quartet would probably identify the triggering event as the works of Joseph Haydn. Without pressing the analogy too hard, the music offered Wednesday evening by the Arditti Quartet and Eliot Fisk represented the genre's development from that mid-18th-century point, through galaxies too various to describe briefly, to the phenomenon of musical supernovas. The Arditti Quartet specializes in new music. Just as accumulated gravity too massive for a star to contain results in its explosion, so did the exploratory reach of the string quartet genre bring its tightly organized discoveries to the point of violent expansion in the modern era. What may have appeared to some Ensemble Music Society patrons as anti-musical about much of the program can be credibly understood and valued as confirmation that the musical universe is ever-expanding. It's self-limiting for a listener to describe the works of Philippe Manoury, Gyorgy Kurtag, Hilda...

  Violinist from Seattle is ready for the world stage The last time Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra audiences heard Mendelssohn's beloved Violin Concerto in E minor, I was at pains to avoid sexist implications in describing the character of the solo playing. This weekend's soloist, like last time, was a young woman who delivered a robust interpretation. With Simone Porter Saturday night, the ISO accompanied a similarly bold, astonishingly ferocious account of the work at Hilbert Circle Theatre. I found it wholly winning, even though at the very start I wondered if there would be too little phrase-to-phrase definition: The familiar phrases were welded into place. Before long, however, more suppleness became evident. The interpretation never lost its solidly constructed quality, but there was so much more. In the first-movement cadenza, the soloist set up a kind of internal dialogue that recalled J.S. Bach's strong influence on the fellow Lutheran (through family c...

Sancho Panza, as the knight's squire, and Don Quixote set out on their adventures. One of the great bromances of literature takes life onstage in a production of a celebrated musical this weekend at the Schrott Center. In "Man of La Mancha," the buddy road trip of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is necessarily shrunk from Miguel de Cervantes' trailblazing novel to some of its essentials by Dale Wasserman and his songwriting collaborators. It's being presented through Sunday to end the 2016-17 Indianapolis Opera season. The insight of Wasserman to thread the author's real-life difficulties through the story of the deluded knight makes the prize-winning adaptation a hymn to idealism summed up in the show's hit song, "The Impossible Dream." The opening-night performance Friday held the banner aloft in the Schrott's intimate setting, giving a chamber-opera feel to this rendition. The adventures are largely centered on the inn that the delu...

[The following playlet was inspired equally by Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and a "Fresh Air" interview with Adam Alter, author of "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked."] A late evening in the future. A small room in Krapp's home, with a plain wooden table front center and one chair behind it. A floor From a production of "Krapp's Last Tape," by Samuel Beckett. lamp should be behind the table and to the left, as though to illuminate an area that's never occupied. There's a small refrigerator toward the rear of the stage, plugged in. Elderly man moves downstage from the back. Hair gray and mussed. He's casually, even shabbily, dressed: scuffed tennis shoes, blue jeans, pullover sweater with a tear at the neck, nondescript shirt. Before sitting down wearily at the desk, takes iPhone from right jeans pocket, holds it up momentarily like a chalice, stare...

Tessa Lark and Peter Klimo won major international awards in 2014. Two substantial sonatas for violin and piano occupied conspicuous positions at either end of a recital presented Tuesday night by Tessa Lark and Peter Klimo. Richard Strauss' youthful E-flat major sonata, op. 18, brought the event at the Indiana History Center to a rousing conclusion. Sergei Prokofiev's Sonata No. 2 in D major, op. 94a, opened the concert, presented under the auspices of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis . As accomplished as the Strauss sonata is for a composer who had so many great works ahead of him, the music bursts at the seams. It's no surprise that, at 23, the future master of opera and the symphonic poem wrote no more chamber music after this sonata. In their performance, Lark and Klimo forged a strong partnership that acknowledged the score's superheroic reach, reveling in the variety of expression and musical material. The unusually titled slow movement,...

The enthralling series of actor-selected plays read for small audiences at Indy Reads Books marked No. 51 Monday night. Indy Actors' Playground, a project shepherded by Lou Harry in partnership with, at first, Bill Simmons, now with Paul Hansen, brought forward Rob Johansen's choice of "Row After Row," by Jessica Dickey. About once a year, I seem to quell anxiety about reviewing a presentation clearly marketed as recreation for the local acting community. That seems right, I guess, though I've enjoyed a few other readings I decided not to blog about. My previous Indy Actors' Playground posts, one from 2015, one from 2016, can be accessed here and also here. Johansen has a knack for finding the grotesque charm in obsessed characters, and so he does as the intensely committed, detail-obsessed Civil War re-enactor Cal in "Row After Row." With the able assistance of Jen Johansen and Mike Floyd, who have similar time-traveling, character-shifting...

Peril in the wider world often has an impact on artistic creation. When Joseph Haydn composed his Missa in angustiis (a title variously translated as "Mass in Time of Fear," "Mass in Time of Peril," "Mass Amidst Difficulties," and "Mass in a Time of Anxiety"), Napoleon was on a roll and was about to conquer Egypt. Joseph Flummerfelt conducted the 'Nelson' Mass. The work speaks to us to today mainly because its forcefulness is joined to a high level of inspiration from a master musician widely regarded in 1798 as Europe's best composer. After  Lord Nelson commanded a decisive naval victory over Napoleon's forces where the Nile empties into the Mediterranean, the work was performed in his honor when the British war hero in 1800 visited the Esterhazy palace where Haydn had been profitably situated for decades. Nelson's name became attached understandably to a piece whose Latin title has proved resistant to a definitive En...

Joshua Weilerstein: Affable, capable and with a message to deliver. Guest conductor Joshua Weilerstein, slender, boyish and wavy-haired, gave a little speech from the podium Saturday evening before he led the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor. It's bold to put into words the effect one wants to have on an audience before delivering the effect musically, but conductors like to try it with problematic pieces. Mario Venzago made a habit of such explanations, and Krzysztof Urbanski, his successor as music director, has gotten more comfortable doing so. The talk was quite apropos, as the Shostakovich Fifth emerged out of social and political conditions unimaginable (so far!) to Americans today. How to take it for what it meant in 1937 can provide guidance to its significance in 2017. In brief, Weilerstein described the work's origin as the composer's attempt to remove himself from danger, and keep at ...

For a half-century, Gary Burton created and upheld a personal style as well as a high standard on his instrument— one perpetually out of the mainstream in jazz, despite stellar contributions 70 to 80 years ago by Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton. Gary Burton and Makoto Ozone are capping 34 years of playing together. The vibraphone, fluently broadening its textural richness with his four-mallet technique, has had no more durable a proponent than Burton, born 74 years ago in Anderson and, as of March 17, ending his U.S. career in his home state in a duo appearance with pianist Makoto Ozone at the Jazz Kitchen . The first set Friday night found the well-established Northside club packed, with an audience including Burton's longtime manager, Ted Kurland, from Boston. At the end of the set, Lewis Ricci of the Indiana Arts Commission read a proclamation from the governor that in effect put a localized Gary Burton layer over St. Patrick's Day. And Jazz Kitchen proprietor David Al...

Olivia and Ethan bond over writing.... The only time I got an author's autograph in a cheap paperback was when Kurt Vonnegut signed my just-purchased copy of "Mother Night" in an Ann Arbor bookstore. The book disappeared from my collection decades ago, either lost or just unreturned by a borrower — I forget which. But a warning in Vonnegut's introduction to the paperback edition has stayed with me. After doubting that his books usually had "morals" (I think several can be teased out of the Hoosier Aesop's oeuvre, actually), the author put "Mother Night"'s this way: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I've always loved the boldness of that first clause: It's not "we will be taken for what we pretend to be, so..." but the absolute "we are what we pretend to be." Either formulation might well apply to Vonnegut's hero, who signs on as an American sp...

Nationalism without tears: Jean Sibelius as a student in Vienna Jean Sibelius, a composer so central to the national consciousness of his homeland, found that closeness a little uncomfortable with the huge success of "Kullervo," a sprawling symphonic poem with chorus and soloists based on the Finnish national epic, Kalevala . He is said to have withdrawn the work from circulation shortly after its much acclaimed Helsinki premiere in 1892, though portions of it were heard over the next several years. Commentators differ on this decision and its motivation, but it's been credibly said that Sibelius' desire to build a reputation beyond Finland caused him to distance himself from the 80-minute work. And he did indeed become internationally admired, even if his best-known work, ironically, is the short symphonic poem "Finlandia," with a hymnlike melody known worldwide. Revived in complete form in the 1970s, "Kullervo" was previously known to me ...

The spacious, well-appointed set Vicki Smith has provided for "Boeing Boeing"  conveys the impression of cultured, calm What a playground! The set of "Boeing Boeing" is redolent of au courant living. modern living. It turns out the spaciousness is a clue not only to the occupant's high-end status in life, but also to the room needed for the physical action taking place there, complete with strategically placed doors. Indiana Repertory Theatre got its production of the Marc Camoletti comedy going over the weekend, and the cavorting typical of farce gets the needed room to romp. The Calder mobile suspended from the apartment ceiling is the show's least mobile element. As seen at Sunday's matinee, there was no let-up in the high pitch of both dialogue and movement in the story of a wealthy bachelor's scheme for keeping alive liaisons with three "air hostesses" — each of whom thinks she's his fiancee. Matt Schwader is Bernard, t...

 Because personal expression, involving composition on the spur of the moment, is essential to jazz, people like to claim a Makoto Ozone and Gary Burton are touring together for the last time. certain honesty is basic to the music. Where that is most questionable may lie in the difficulty about being honest about aging. Jazz shares in common with other forms of entertainment a strong reluctance to leave the scene. I recall Dizzy Gillespie shaking a "rain stick," hitting the floor with it while doing simple dance steps, at Clowes Hall; all he could do with the trumpet was puff a few woolly notes at a time with his bell into the microphone. Quite a falling off from his quondam brilliance! Gary Burton remembers seeing B.B. King toward the end of his life: "I loved him dearly. It was a sad evening and he was a shadow of his former self." And Lionel Hampton, the jazz pioneer on Burton's instrument, the vibraphone, was so afflicted with arthritis late in hi...