Escher String Quartet ascends to the heights of Beethoven in Ensemble Music concert

The Escher String Quartet offered two Viennese classics plus Ades.

"Allegro con spirito" is the movement direction that was clearly embodied as the Escher String Quartet played the first measures of Haydn's String Quartet in G, op. 76, no. 1, on Wednesday evening.

There was plenty of spirit, plus an admirably robust sound, which prevailed throughout the work. Presented by Ensemble Music Society, the American ensemble, in residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, projected a variegated, sympathetic concept of Haydn at the top of his form in the genre he practically invented.

The large audience in the Basile Auditorium of the Indiana History Center took to the Eschers immediately as a result. The warm rapport thus established helped sustain its obvious fascination with the late-20th-century piece that followed, "Arcadiana" by Thomas Adès. The English composer wrote this at the beginning of an illustrious career that has carried him to the forefront of contemporary music in the United Kingdom.

The seven-movement suite presents an astonishing variety of idealistic evocations of

The French artist Poussin painted "Et in Arcadia ego" in 1637-38.

journeys to better places of the imagination. These depictions are inevitably shadowed by the death we all know to be our lot, as summed up in the Latin title of Nicolas Poussin's painting, "Et in Arcadia ego," with its central tomb in an idyllic pastoral setting. The work was a specific inspiration for the fourth movement of "Arcadiana." Nicholas Johnson's detailed program notes set every movement of the 20-minute piece in attractive context.

It's remarkable that so young a composer was able to reach out to so many styles of musical expression and fold them into his own language. The hints of older music, sometimes approaching quotation, seem much more successfully bound into something fresh than a few American composers (George Rochberg and Jacob Druckman, for example) achieved while high modernism, keyed to serialism, began breaking down as orthodoxy several decades ago. The wispy phrases of the finale, "Lethe," toy with the polarity of memorability and forgetfulness — an opposition that gives substance to all journeys we may undertake to Arcadia away from this life.

M.C. Escher's "Relativity": Games of perspective

The Eschers lived up to the Dutch artist they honor in their name with the well-knit manner in which they addressed the complexity of perspectives in this work. And all three of the pieces presented harness the centrifugal forces within them to produce coherent narratives, on all of which this quartet shone a bright light. Unanimity of concept and execution characterized the concert, though the Escher lacked the exquisite, unshakable balance of the Danish String Quartet that EMS presented last month.

The most extensive illustration of the Eschers' estimable skills came after intermission. It was Beethoven's Quartet in A minor, op. 132. The formally innovative work features a lengthy slow movement illustrating the composer's gratitude at recovery from a severe health crisis reflective of the horrendous burdens besides deafness that bedeviled Beethoven late in life.

The changing meaning of the two-part process of devout thankfulness and regained strength as the movement proceeds is vital to any performance.  The Eschers showed themselves remarkably patient about illuminating the transformation of the two themes into a conclusive outpouring of gratitude. 

The other four movements also had a complementary vigor and unhurried tension and release about them. Though the ovation was sustained and vigorous at the end, there seemed to be a general understanding that no encore was needed or even appropriate after such a performance of such a work.

Happy reunion: Ronen Chamber Ensemble meets UIndy's Faculty Artist Series

The  sizable 20th-century ensemble pieces that ended each half of Monday night's collaboration between University of Indianapolis and the Ronen Chamber Ensemble presented a polarity that might be found throughout the history of music.

On the one hand, the exploratory, extroverted muse of Luciano Berio was represented by his "Folk Songs" (1964). On the other, there was the focused expression of singular personality in Francis Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet (1931). It's almost tempting to put forward an analogy to the ancient Greek aphorism made popular by the 20th-century thinker Isaiah Berlin: "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing."

The fey charms of Poulenc's music don't sit easily with the idea of knowing "one big thing," but the variety he pursued thrives within a small range, bound on one side by his religious devotion, with its touch of sentimentality, and on the other by his insouciance and boulevardier brio. He made those discrepancies work within a personal style; to his credit, Poulenc thus can be said to know one big thing, and know it thoroughly.

Berio group (minus percussionists Jack Brennan and Terence Mayhue and cellist Ingrid Fischer-Bellman): Vu Nguyen, Emilee Drumm, Heaven Fan, Tamara Thweatt, David Bellman, Mitzi Westra.

Despite the stylistic focus, the sextet turns up one surprise after another — the total held within prescribed limits, however. Each movement (especially the first) has sharply contrasting material to explore, set amid those side-slipping tonalities and cheeky dissonances that make the Poulenc manner seem meandering, even random, but turn out to establish a jaunty hedgehog-like purposefulness. The piece was brightly performed by Gregory Martin, piano, with the conventional instrumentation of the wind quintet: flute (Tamara Thweatt), oboe (Pamela Ajango), clarinet (David Bellman), bassoon (Mark Ortwein), and horn (Darin Sorley).

For a composer to communicate a personality may be more important than evidence that new terrain must be explored. Poulenc thus survives within an enchanting eddy off the modernist mainstream. Berio is more a part of that mainstream, but he never sounds settled within even the new conventions of his time. He was a fox. "Folk Songs" satisfied me much more than the Sextet; it simply draws more deeply from the well-nourished iconoclasm I find exciting about 20th-century music.

In this work, Berio not only paid tribute to his flesh-and-blood muse, the soprano Cathy Berberian, but also drew his selected folk songs from the aesthetic of recordings more than actual field work of the kind for which Bartok and Kodaly were famous. Further evidence that he was not interested in anthropological authenticity is that two of the songs in the middle have his original melodies. The instrumental settings suggest both the uniqueness of folk ensembles and the unconventional chamber-music combinations of high modernism, filtered through a monaural recording ambiance.

On Monday, Vu Nguyen led a lively, glinting performance of the suite. Berio's choices in the accompaniment grab the attention without detracting from the vocal solo. Harp is especially prominent, with the other instruments showcased to varying degrees and with an uncanny rightness of blend. The instrumental codas always sound like the songs' last (and best) word.

Mezzo-soprano Mitzi Westra invested each song with appropriate expressiveness (though the absence of texts, or even descriptions of them, withheld meaning to a significant extent). I would have liked a more nasal, almost forced and nonclassical quality in a few of the Mediterranean songs and the concluding Azerbaijan Love Song. Remember that Bulgarian women's choir that was such a hit years ago? Something similar in solo terms might have been more idiomatic here and there, even though Westra conveys pretty convincingly everything she puts her voice to. The initial two songs in English of Appalachian provenance set the stage for the kind of sincerity and plainness that seem to spark Berio on his merry way with this deep-grained material.

The program also included a Ronen commission in its first performance. Matthew Bridgham's "Avon Yard" directs the quartet

A view of the Avon railyard from the Ronen's visit there.

of Ronen co-founders David Bellman, and Ingrid Fischer-Bellman, cello, together with Martin and violinist Joana Genova,  to vary their sounds from unpitched to "somewhat pitched" to "clearly pitched" in evoking the CSX railyard in Avon, Indiana. The quartet's members visited the railyard as part of their preparation for a work calling for "guided improvisation."

The 12-minute piece must be the most intimate, subdued evocation of railroad matters ever attempted in music: No "Pacific 231" here. More like Michael Colgrass' unrailroad-like "As Quiet As," but less self-conscious. It's a loosely assembled soundscape of cars trundling slowly amid the yard's other mechanical sounds, all at the hushed end of the sound spectrum, culminating in a lulling medley of pitched fragments — a novelty well-positioned on this program.

The concert opened with Arvo Pärt's "Fratres," probably the Estonian composer's most famous work. It's both durable and fashionable in a personalized spiritual manner. It exists in several settings, evoking a monastic procession with a repeated theme subject to both simple and fancy variation. Genova and Martin were the simpatico partners in a performance that gained assurance after the violinist's somewhat ragged string-crossings in the first part. The varied articulation called for later was more stably achieved. This is one of those pieces in which, if the audience gets the impression that one or more of the performers is working really hard, the desired effect is lost.

I don't know about Bridgham, having heard only "Avon Yard," but Pärt is definitely a hedgehog.

Funnier by the dozen?: Phoenix Theatre adds to its 'Xmas' legacy with the final Park Avenue installment

This is an era of disbelief and unbelief, much of it political. A certain Twitter user can't be believed any more in 280 characters

Paul Collier Hansen's Santa casts a skeptical look.

than he could in 140. Tax reform that is purported to help ordinary people but glaringly favors corporations and the very rich ratchets up the general skepticism.

But the difficulty of holding onto something enduring is part of the age-old Christmas brand, so the holiday fits right in. The challenge extends from "the reason for the season" that's often thrown in our faces right through the values that are wrapped up in gift-giving — a legacy aimed at our wallets as much as our hearts.

So it's little wonder that "A Very Phoenix Xmas," the Phoenix Theatre comedy-variety show that just entered its 12th season, puts a lot of the fun it stirs up squarely on the problem of whom and what to believe in. To start with, there's the inevitable encounter with the illusions of childhood about Santa Claus and how to keep them intact at all costs.

That pops up early in "Up to Snow Good," directed and curated by Bryan Fonseca and Thomas Horan. It's virtually certain that when a married couple connive at canoodling on Christmas Eve, believing their young daughter to be asleep, they will be totally unnerved by something extraordinary.

Here it's the crashing descent of Santa down their chimney, instantly limp and comatose. The sketch is rich in physical comedy as the couple try to animate the elfin corpse after their curious daughter rushes in from her bedroom. The amazingly supple Rob Johansen sustains a believably limp Kris Kringle while the parents wrestle with how to dispose of the body — just as parents have from time immemorial struggled with how to dispose gracefully of the legend.

The sketch draws a lot of its energy from the parents' desperation to spare the child the horror of realizing her globe-trotting benefactor may be out of commission now and for Christmases yet to come. Physical comedy is quite prominent in "Up to Snow Good," as is a variety of choreography designed by Mariel Greenlee. As usual, Greenlee adjusts her ideas to the varied dance skills of the Phoenix Xmas cast to show them off well.  The only number that puzzled me was the unconventional pas de deux set to "I'll Be Home for Christmas" — flowing when subject to shadowy illumination, static when fully lit in front of a white backdrop. I infer that the words that follow the title — "if only in my dreams" — are being realized to illustrate the contrast between really being home for Christmas and only dreaming about it.

Reconciling being in a setting you love versus just imagining it is just another way of posing the credibility problem that the holidays push to the forefront. "Up to Snow Good" uses as framework for the sketches a prime milieu for skepticism: the usefulness of higher education when judged against the hype that surrounds it. In this case, it's the University of the North Pole, touted, with sometimes transparent falsity, in a series of monologues interspersed throughout. The monologues are mostly clever and delivered with spirit, but I wonder if this setting needed a sketch of its own to launch the production and tie everything together more substantially.

Shermy (Nathan Robbins)  broods on his marginalization as a classic comic strip's only Jewish character.

Several sketches have been revived from previous Very Phoenix Xmas shows, including the final outburst of raucous comedy, "The Things They Merried," Eric Pfeffinger's representation of the "war on Christmas," with Johansen as a kind of alt-right militarist leading the charge against the largely secular retail behemoth. The rapid-fire exchange of platitudes and insults is vigorously staged with simulated combat niftily sustained until it reaches a conclusion worthy of being recounted in heroic terms by the Christmas-touting militiaman to his grandson.

Other revivals worth seeing again involved technical triumphs, such as the large puppets representing Nativity figures for the song "Don't Eat the Baby." The scene gives audiences the ultimate unstable stable behind the Bethlehem inn, and goes as far in the direction of irreverence as anything in "Up to Snow Good." Maybe Fonseca's conception of mashing up two familiar Hallelujahs, Leonard Cohen's and G.F. Handel's, justifies its place largely for the sake of balance.

Mark Harvey Levine has over the years has represented the summit of the show's comical charm. This time he reappears as the  writer of the new "Requiem for Shermy," a tribute to a briefly used and early discontinued "Peanuts" character, and the reprise of a brilliant parody of "Les Miz" songs. That's set predictably amid discontent and turbulence among the elves and reindeer and titled "Les Miserabelves," a rambunctious sketch that rousingly ends the first act.

Besides Johansen, the fit and effervescent cast includes Jean Arnold, Paul Collier Hansen, Andrea Heiden, Carlos Medina Maldonado, Devan Mathias, Gail Payne, and Nathan Robbins.

As many people try to keep their cynicism at bay, "Up to Snow Good" in one sketch locates that pervasive feeling at its source: the Twitterstorms of the current occupant of the Oval Office. "'Twas the Tweet Before Christmas," by Michael Hosp and Jeffrey Martin, indicates what we can continue to expect as the tweets of resentment, revenge and meanspiritedness accumulate, subject to "fake-news" analysis and questions clumsily batted away by the administration's time-servers
and sycophants.

Sadly, there are more than chestnuts roasting on an open fire this season; the truth is burning up as well. "Up to Snow Good" will allow you to feel the warmth generated by that fire more positively, even if some of your cherished beliefs get scorched.

[Photos by Zach Rosing]

Delfeayo Marsalis has a pal (or two) in Kalamazoo

Delfeayo Marsalis is the third-best-known Marsalis brother, and that seems a

Paisley on steroids: Sharp dresser Delfeayo Marsalis

distinction worth having. As he and his first-rate siblings settle comfortably into middle age, they still benefit from the early tutelage they received from their father, Ellis, who has frequently joined them onstage and for recordings.

In "Kalamazoo," (Troubadour Jass Records), we get to hear what happened when the trombonist-bandleader, now 52, took his quartet to Western Michigan University for a concert in April 2015. Besides his dad on piano, he brought along bassist Reginald Veal and drummer Ralph Peterson. In the course of the concert, Marsalis has a couple of WMU jazz students sit in on an original blues, "Blue Kalamazoo" — vocalist Christian Diaz and drummer Madison George. The comfort level is high.

It's an ingratiating set, full of well-known pieces, except for that localized blues and Delf's "The Secret Love Affair," a midtempo work to a Latin pulse that leaves a pastel impression. The standards include one that's standard only in the ears of the nation, not on the jazz bandstand: the "Sesame Street" theme.

For that, Marsalis mutes his trombone and growls in his solo. Elsewhere, he's featured on open horn, where he is equally clever. For the children's TV show theme, Peterson supplements his attack by striking tiny cymbals, and the quartet frolics along, right through the whimsical coda. 

Ellis quotes "It Ain't Necessarily So," and seems to have had little restraint in indulging the habit that evening. The peak comes during his solo on "It Don't Mean a Thing," when we hear bits of "Joshua Fit De Battle," "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," "Blue Skies" and "Swinging on a Star." I like the senior Marsalis' straightforward, old-fashioned style, but the quote machine overheats now and then.

The pianist gets a nice feature on "If I Were a Bell" as his son sits out. Of course, in this case, starting out by evoking the Westminster chimes is pertinent. The track is notable as well for a splendid bowed Veal solo, accompanied by the bassist's vocal at the unison in the manner of  Slam Stewart. 

Peterson does imaginative work throughout. He lends extra perkiness to a slow, nearly 10-minute version of "Tin Roof Blues." That's not to say the performance would otherwise have been boring. The rapport between Ellis and Delfeayo is particularly fine here. The trombonist (whose first name is accented on the second syllable on his website, on the first by his publicist) treats himself to a couple of quotes ("Willow Weep for Me," and "Mona Lisa") in an exemplary solo. Ellis juxtaposes both leaping and smoothly melodic phrases during his turn in the spotlight.

Peterson does some fine work on brushes behind Ellis on "My Funny Valentine" and "Autumn Leaves." Veal's exchanges with Peterson smartly set up a good drum solo in the latter number. 

The set ends with loving treatment of a song that will probably always carry a deep meaning for the stellar Crescent City family: "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"  

'Deed they do.





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Time for a song to celebrate courage and assign shame: Charlie Rose is the latest in astonishing celebrity free falls of male celebrities

Sean Chen explores some musical byways in solo recital for APA at Indiana Landmarks Center

An out-of-the-way first half set the stage for more familiar repertoire by Maurice Ravel in the second half of Sean

Sean Chen brings the little-known to light.

Chen's recital Sunday afternoon at Indiana Landmarks Center.

The popular 2013 winner of the American Pianists Association's classical competition began with little-known, substantial works by two unconventional, early 20th-century composers: Nikolai Medtner of Russia and Federico Mompou of Spain.

Catalonia has been much in the news lately with an independence movement that has roiled Spanish politics. Mompou was a Catalan who seemed independent of everyone, countrymen or not. An entry in the 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians makes him seem like a mystical hermit out of J.R.R. Tolkien. 

There may not be any account of a composer in that venerable reference set more bizarre, in which Mompou's music unleashes a host of literary references from the writer, including Robert Browning, Sir Thomas Browne, Thornton Wilder, and Enoch Soames. The last-named author, an imaginary poet created by Max Beerbohm, is quoted favorably to shed light on Mompou as if Soames really existed. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around the meaning of this citation: "A French critic once said that some of [Mompou's] music could be dictated in words without making use of any conventional music-writing method." That may be a kind of reverse Zen koan. Or maybe Method acting applied to musical composition.

This fragrant essay, which carries a whiff of parody about it, applies mostly to Mompou's miniatures. Chen offered an extended work, Variations on a Theme of Chopin, to open the recital. Harder to follow than many sets of variations rooted in 19th-century style, the variations depart capriciously from the theme, the simple, forthright Prelude in A major, op. 28, no. 7. Everything converges in a wild blend of majesty and headlong energy in the 12th variation, a "galope" followed by an epilogue. There a reverant seal is placed upon the theme, which will never be the same for me after this performance.

The Classical Fellowship winner of four years ago then turned his focus to the individualistic but less eccentric Medtner. Chen typically displays the power and accuracy of his contemporaries, but there's a special quality — a personal flair — that lifts his performances above today's steely-fingered norm. That came out in Medtner's Sonata-Ballade, op. 27. The potential clash of song and structure in the first movement was finessed in a well-ordered performance with thoughtful layering of the material. The second movement is all tension and anticipation, leading to a stormy fugue in the finale. Chen's hypnotizing interpretation of the piece made it seem well worth encountering more often.

The picturesqueness of Ravel's "Miroirs" is classically conceived, despite the highly colored treatment of such subjects as "a boat on the ocean," "moths," and "sad birds." By that I mean that the titles do not invite us to find programmatic content in every measure. Mompou might inspire literary fantasies, but Ravel in this set of charmers doesn't invite us to conjure up any more images than those suggested by the five titles. 

The individual pieces essentially show what the piano can do as put through a Ravel filter, with the subjects in the titles suggestive, but not explicitly detailed.  Changes of meter, precise pedaling indications, and some drawn-out dynamic shifts over rapid figuration carry the message in other than visual terms.

For example, after Chen caught the rhythmic sparkle and dash of "Alborada del gracioso," the most intensely choreographic piece in "Miroirs," the attention to resonance and the feeling of music coming through at various distances put the listener in a vastly different world for "La vallee des cloches," the final piece. 

Chen turned to the purely abstract Ravel to end the program: the Toccata from "Le Tombeau de Couperin." Ravel's chaste manner of using accents and the subtle variations in dynamics were scrupulously represented in Chen's fleet performance, mounting inevitably to the triple forte final measures. Justifiably called back for an encore, the recitalist offered an effective contrast — his introspective adaptation of the "Adagio ma non tanto" movement of Bach's third violin-keyboard sonata.

A new U.S. senator?: Shelter from the storm is the offer Alabama seems to have extended to Roy Moore

Come In, Roy Moore, We’ll Give You Shelter from the Storm

‘Twas in another lifetime, while building his career

He got no satisfaction without a nymphet near.

It only came out later he was running true to form.

Come in, Roy Moore, we’ll give you

       shelter from the storm.

So many teenage girls he tended to appall

They banned this creepy lawyer from the Gadsden shopping mall.

Do you think he was a predator? Well, you’re getting warm!

But ’Bama voters want to give him

      shelter from the storm.

He grew his base when he defied two orders from the court

Not to make the halls of justice a Ten Commandments fort.

There’s nothing that can stop him, no matter how he’s warned.

So Alabama’s poised to give him

       shelter from the storm.

Of politician sex offenders, he’s offended most:

His victims’ testimony was printed in the Post,

But that’s just propaganda, made up, it don’t inform,

Us Alabama voters offer him

       shelter from the storm.

Defenders thump their Bibles and search it for a text

To justify behavior that has so many vexed;

They cite Joseph and Mary, to whom was Jesus born;

Come in, they say, Roy Moore, and take

      shelter from the storm.

The Alabama governor amplifies the shout

To put a child molester in, keep the Democrat out:

The public good’s dispensable, we have a brand-new norm:

Come in, Judge Moore, we’ll give you

      shelter from the storm.

Across the land, the people wake, call monsters to atone;

When you hurt women, girls, or boys, you must stand alone:

But here in Dixie, we close ranks behind him, we’re not torn!

Come in, Judge Moore, our votes will give you

      shelter from the storm.

Be loyal to the creep you love’s the new GOP tenet

And come December 12^th, they’ll send Roy Moore to the Senate:

Endorse the Christian predator, don’t mind the nation’s scorn:

The judge won’t budge if he is given

      shelter from the storm.

Indianapolis Opera trains its renewed bright lights upon a repertory staple, Verdi's 'La Traviata'

The production of "La Traviata" that local opera fans are seeing this weekend at the Tarkington in Carmel reflects the collaborative mood of Indianapolis Opera's new management. It got some seasoning in Evansville first, just over a week ago,  with orchestra and chorus members from that city. Today it concludes a three-day stand at the Center for the Performing Arts.

Violetta (Emily Birsan) gives vent to her joie de vivre at a Paris party.

The production team stayed intact, headed by Jon Truitt as stage director, Alfred Savia as conductor. The Evansville conductor, familiar to Indianapolis audiences through his association dating from the 1990s with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, wanted to revive opera in Evansville, where he's led the Evansville Philharmonic for decades.

It looks as if there will be a continuing link between opera there and opera here every other year, according to IO's general director, David Craig Starkey. Truitt, who had directed opera at the University of Evansville and now teaches at Ball State University, felt the same about boosting opera in Indiana's southernmost big city. His friendship with Starkey through staging operas in Asheville, N.C., is now bearing fruit here.

As seen Saturday night, "La Traviata" has its essentials intact. The production sits well in the intimate space of the Tarkington. Much of its success came from the scrupulous pacing of the music under Savia's baton, using adept local musicians. I wish the preludes to the first and third acts could have proceeded without the formal choreography that accompanied them; it would have settled the audience into the pathos of the story without the implication that abstract dance movement for three couples adds something pertinent.

There are some cuts to bring each performance within a three-hour limit, as well as to concentrate the story on the three-way relationship among the initially shy but increasingly ardent Alfredo, the stylish but consumptive courtesan Violetta whom he loves, and Alfredo's provincial father, Giorgio Germont. Although understandable from a cost and staging standpoint, the elimination of the costumed gypsy dancers and imitation bullfighters at the second-act party was regrettable.

Something of the extravagant frivolity of the Parisian beau monde was thus not impressed upon the audience — a milieu in contrast with the tension between the financially stressed young lovers and the resistance to their romance by Alfredo's dad. A supertitle reference to "the maskers" whose appearance party hostess Flora anticipates remains as a ghostly reminder of the omission. The ensemble singing, prepared by longtime IO chorus director John Schmid, is good enough to offer partial compensation for the trimmed revelry. In Act 1, the chorus also did much to establish Violetta's tinselly world and her illness-dogged place in it.

Violetta and Alfredo start feeling mutual attraction in Indianapolis Opera's "Traviata."

The stage picture is especially weak in the second-act party scene as well, since the backdrop — including a gnarled tree — is identical to the scene before it, set in the expensive country estate that the lovers occupy to test and enjoy their fraught affair. That's where their love is threatened on a couple of accounts: its debilitating costliness and family opposition to the liaison between the passionate, profligate scion and "the fallen woman" (one of a few reasonably accurate translations of the opera's title). The roiling clouds behind the action don't quite make the estate look like bucolic bliss, but with some shifting for the last act, they can be taken as an abstract symbol of Violetta's inevitable fate: succumbing to tuberculosis in Paris at the very moment of reconciliation with the junior and senior Germonts.

Emily Birsan put a glorious stamp upon all aspects of Violetta — the first act's  high-spirited coquette with a soul, the self-sacrificial heroine of Act 2, and the fading flower showing a few bursts of vivid color of Act 3. If some of her high notes overshot the mark in "Sempre libera," for the most part her coloratura remained brilliant and well-honed. Her Violetta projected reciprocal interest in Alfredo despite herself; the conflict within the character was managed well. I liked the touch of her twirling a camellia as she contemplated continuing her freedom untrammeled by true love, then dropping the flower upon hearing Alfredo's offstage declaration of love.

She was touching in responding to the initially fierce Germont in Act 2, and put much apt variation in her vocal production to register the searing cost of the sacrifice the protective old man is demanding of her. "Dite alla giovene," Violetta's plea to have what she is doing for the Germont family known to them, wrenched the heart as it should. The ebb and flow of Violetta's energy, both vocal and physical, was exquisitely managed in the finale.

Gregory Turay's Alfredo was appropriately diffident about launching the drinking song he is asked to supply in the first act. It was one of the few indications of the hero's shyness, and it was well worth establishing, because his long-nurtured infatuation for Violetta soon sweeps everything else away as the fires of love are stoked. Turay colored and softened his capable tenor marvelously in duets with the soprano, but more variation of timbre and volume elsewhere would have been welcome. White-hot passion, ironically enough, doesn't have to be monochromatic to be felt as such.

As Germont, Christopher Burchett came across as what's been called "the heavy father" type as he meets Violetta for the first time in Act 2. The characterization softened as the conversation went along, and his somewhat reedy baritone became more attractive. His plea to Alfredo later in the act, "Di provenza il mar," had the flavor of both Germont's paternal provincialism and his heartfelt need to console his son for the breakup the old man has engineered. Thus his near-sobbing delivery of the second strophe didn't seem out of place.

Of the other roles, I was struck by the sincerity and compassionate ring that Oliver Worthington gave to Doctor Grenvil and soprano Shannon Paige Christie to Annina, faithfully attending the dying Violetta and helping to establish, before the repentant Germonts rush in, that the admirable courtesan is nowhere near as friendless as she has supposed. Her final cry of "Joy!" lifts up all Violetta's awareness of her protracted suffering to a transcendent plane and, as performed Saturday night, sent out the indelible message that joy in life is all the more precious for its evanescence.

[Photos by Denis Ryan Kelly Jr.]

A plethora of Prokofiev: ISO opens weekend devoted to the Russian composer's piano concertos

Precocious and independent-minded, Sergei Prokofiev saw his mission as a composer from the keyboard outward. This perspective makes his piano concertos especially revealing of his personality. A restive student who took into adulthood a canny instinct for putting his best foot forward, he produced music that seems to admit no obstacles. In fact, he had to trim his sails upon his return to Stalinist Russia, but he proved able to do that too, despite feeling the regime's hot breath on his neck.

Of the five piano concertos he wrote, the three presented Friday night by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra span 20 years on either side of the Revolution whose centenary is being observed this year. Crowning the set was No. 3 in C major, contemporaneous with the Bolshevik crucible out of which a new tyranny emerged from the old. Typically, the work, cobbled together between 1917 and 1921, goes its own glorious way without allusion to the great national struggle.

Local favorite Garrick Ohlsson returns for ISO's Prokofiev weekend.

As soloist for this durable masterpiece, the ISO could hardly have done better than Garrick Ohlsson. Now something of an elder statesman, Ohlsson has been in the forefront of American concert pianists since he won the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw in 1970. I first heard him the following year, playing an unusual recital in Ann Arbor that showed his adeptness in Baroque music as well as in early modern French and Spanish pieces.

His interpretation of the Prokofiev Third, smoothly coordinated with music director Krzysztof Urbanski's control of the orchestra, was quite well-knit. The piece itself is more consistently inspired than the other two concertos (Nos. 1 and 4)  presented Friday evening in Hilbert Circle Theatre. Ohlsson was scrupulously attuned to what was going on, or was about to happen, in the orchestra. Introducing the second theme of the first movement, for example, he used a very dry touch that almost seemed to promise: "You are about to hear castanets playing the same rhythm." And then you did. Furthermore, the way Ohlsson moved into the rapid passagework that climaxes the first movement had an uncommon blend of  grace and drive.

The variations of the second movement elaborated upon the memorable theme patiently, with a delicate rubato feeling between the piano and the accompaniment. The finale was rhythmically acute from all forces and featured some fine string tone in the lovely second theme. Its sudden interruption by the piano with "a quietly grotesque passage" — "locus classicus of Prokofiev's habit of 'stepping on the throat of his own song'" — here did not seem so drastic or bizarre as Alan Frank's description implies. Ohlsson treated its surprising quality tenderly, as if Prokofiev were simply stepping back from his wonderful melody to take stock before resuming the argument that brings the concerto to a spectacular conclusion.

Called back for an encore, Ohlsson apologized for not being able to offer anything else by Prokofiev except a piece that lasts 35 minutes (I wonder what that would be?), so he turned to Chopin: As he did four years ago in an ISO appearance, he offered an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64, No. 2.  He filled the piece with many marvels, not all of which would be welcome to encounter many more times. It was certainly no cookie-cutter version, and he deserves credit for that.

Alon Goldstein presented the best possible case for two Prokofiev concertos

The concert's first half featured Alon Goldstein as soloist, starting with Concerto No 1 in D-flat major, op. 10.  Goldstein played like a Prokofiev specialist, which is not to say he might not be as satisfactory in other music. It's just that he seemed fully imbued with the Prokofiev spirit both here and in the Concerto No. 4 in B major, a work for the left hand alone that never found favor with the pianist who commissioned it, Paul Wittgenstein.

I love the succinctness with which Grove's Dictionary introduces its Prokofiev entry: "He established himself as a composer of heavily ironic, often wilful and unconventional music in the last years of tsarist Russia." Those qualities are amply evident in the 1912 D-flat major concerto. There is ample flair in the solo part, indicative of the composer's breezy self-confidence as a performer. The second movement opens with a gossamer clarinet solo and other nice touches, but turns into something too insistent, with a heavy climax. The finale includes a perky march, which might fit the description "heavily ironic."

Anna Vinnitskaya is the ISO's third featured piano soloist this weekend.

Yet Prokofiev's mood in the third-movement march strikes me as largely blithe and cheeky, typical of what the smartest kid in the class might turn out to show he could toss off a march as a way to set up a climax. His younger contemporary Dmitri Shostakovich, more under the thumb of the Soviet regime, indulged in more savage irony in his marches.

The left-hand concerto, with Prokofiev well-established internationally by 1931, seems more gratuitously exhibitionistic. Played with commendable flair and commitment by Goldstein, the performance survived rather loose coordination early in the first movement. Once it jelled, there was plenty of opportunity to note that the work shows Prokofiev as being more self-involved in his cleverness than usual: the passage in the piano's bass register underlined by the bass drum, for example. 

The lyricism of the second movement became pretty heavy. When he was less inspired, Prokofiev brought forth a lyrical manner that seems labored even when it is gentle. The third and fourth movements amounted to a fillip of virtuosity and panache in a work perhaps best appreciated by committed Prokofiev fans. 

The rest of this weekend's concerts bring back Goldstein for the Fourth,  Ohlsson for the Third and Fifth, and introduce Anna Vinnitskaya in two performances of the Second. Today's concert will be launched with Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony. Exact schedules can be found on the symphony's website.

Brahms showcase: Two principals occupy the spotlight successfully in this weekend's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts

Cellist Austin Huntington: Makes debut as ISO member-soloist.

Featured soloists drawn from the orchestra usually don't have to do double duty. But when two principals of string sections are spotlighted in the same concerto, it's no wonder their services as section leaders are too valuable to do without, as is customary when they are featured soloists.

So it was in the first of this weekend's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts on Thursday morning, when concertmaster Zach De Pue and principal cellist Austin Huntington were on the Hilbert Circle Theatre stage throughout the Coffee Concert.

They led their respective sections in Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 101 in D major ("The Clock"), then took up soloist positions to conductor Krzysztof Urbanski's left for Johannes Brahms' Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra. (For the remaining concerts keyed to the formidable Brahms "Double," the same composer's Variations on a Theme by Haydn will complete the program.)

ISO audiences have often heard Zach De Pue solo.

Huntington and De Pue had their work cut out for them in the concerto, a unique composition in the Romantic era. Once the solo concerto took root in the first half of the 19th century, bringing more than one soloist to the fore became rare.

Fortunately, the Brahms Double is both characteristic of the complex expressive nature of its composer and so well laid out that the soloists get to explore all sorts of interaction clearly.  There's considerable exchange of lyrical passages, some statement and counter-statement, and much wonderful digging in together, especially in the last movement.

The partnership Thursday was solid, much more than congenial. It seemed to reach beyond amity to register the grandest statement possible from two young masters — both of whom were hired for their positions while in their 20s (Huntington just barely out of his teens). The cello part, somewhat dominant overall, was always in good hands, from the opening recitative-like solo on.

Urbanski managed the accompaniment handsomely. The first tutti revealed some imprecision in the violins, but the material comes back frequently, and gradually it attained more unanimity Thursday. The wind colors in the second movement were bright yet unobtrusive. This movement also made evident the advantage of positioning the double basses on a higher platform along the back than I remember ever seeing them on. 

The finale may be Brahms' most imaginative use of the rondo form. The Gypsy vigor of the main theme is nicely set off against a variety of episodes, including some passages that, in this performance, helped lend suspense and heighten anticipation of the theme's return. More projection from the solo violin, perhaps a matter of acoustical variation around the hall, was the only thing lacking, especially toward the finale's climax, in a top-drawer exhibition of the strength the ISO enjoys in its first-chair first violins and cellos.

Urbanski opened the concert with one of Joseph Haydn's magisterial "London" symphonies. "The Clock," so named from the steady tick-tock of its Andante, was especially fetching in that movement. The episode in the minor made a startling entrance, creating an effective contrast with the measured propriety of the main theme. A measure of "grand pause" here was spoiled in its drolly dramatic effect by premature applause. Clapping between movements can be tolerated, but when the conductor is beating through just one measure where no one plays, and still applause intrudes, suspicions are stirred. 

The expansive minuet-and-trio movement was vigorously accented and retained its hold on the attention, though I didn't pick up on all the comical details that program host Doug Dillon told the audience to listen for. The controlled "driftiness" of the trio was slightly amusing, but I was mainly focused on the excellence of assistant principal flutist Rebecca Price Arrensen, sitting first chair at this concert.

The smooth-running finale brought out the best from the violins, who characterized its vigor about as well as they had in a much different atmosphere when leading the orchestra in the gently mysterious introduction to the first movement. In one of the episodes, the stirring Sturm und Drang recollection of an earlier Haydn period was most captivating, and the complex treatment of the main theme received scintillating treatment here. It was especially marvelous to notice Huntington's and De Pue's full-bore commitment to this busy music right before they were called upon to make glorious work of the Brahms Double.

King's Singers put vocal treasure on display during their golden-anniversary tour stop at Clowes Hall

Everything was tinged with gold in the King's Singers concert Wednesday night at Clowes Hall. The male a cappella sextet is not long into a 14-month tour in

King's Singers: The current personnel of the nearly 50-year-old a cappella masters.

celebration of its founding in 1968 at King's College, Cambridge. And if many groups of its kind strike it rich from time to time, the King's Singers are Fort Knox.

Though what they offer is the result of discipline and musical insight, the six Englishmen seem to exhibit a kind of unfailing telepathy and spontaneous unanimity. Notes are attacked and released without the slightest blurring, and the sculpting of phrases has the flow and certainty of a master wood carver's. Dynamic variety is lent precisely without any blurting in the texture.

Whether the material  has a Renaissance pedigree or comes from its own lifetime, the King's Singers apparently won't rest without getting inside the right musical idiom for each piece and making a vibrant show of it. A brace of works from the far ends of its repertoire opened Wednesday's program to prove the point:
A setting of King's College founder Henry VI's prayer "Domine Jesu" was followed  by former ensemble member and brilliant arranger Bob Chilcott's "The Human Family," to a text by the revered American poet Maya Angelou. 

The latter work allowed the ensemble to exhibit a skill that was to return again and again: a knack for making the independence of each voice both stand out firmly and nestle comfortably within the texture. Accompaniment patterns almost invariably carry the same interest as the melody, which in any case tends to be passed around. Pitch security seemed unerring. 

The five voices of William Byrd's "Sing Joyfully" (a setting of Psalm 80) attained a special piquancy at the end, with crunchy dissonance at the final cadence. And, with all six men involved, a tricky arrangement of "Down by the Riverside" had them layering and rearranging the text skillfully and managing key changes without warping the blend.

Gentle humor as well as piety made for the King's Singers' most notable foray away from the Anglo-American orbit, in the four prayer settings of Francis Poulenc's "Salve Regina." The French composer's knack for fashioning plain-featured choral structures seems slightly exotic and whimsical came through particularly well in the third and fourth prayers.

The newest commission on the program, Nico Muhly's "The Door of This House," had that composer's slightly fey, idiosyncratic manner of flowering phrases subsiding into more closed, even inhibited patterns — all of it eventually making sense in a surprising way. That was a good place for intermission to occur, so that Muhly's  oddities could just hang in our heads for a while.

More conventional approaches to a cappella writing came in the second half with Richard Rodney Bennett's fervent setting of John Donne, "Sermons and Devotions," and John Rutter's fragrant interpretation of Caliban's enchanted speech about his island from Shakespeare's "Tempest."

Some putting away of the iPads and music stands allowed the sextet to move toward the end informally, in close formation to match its close harmonies. One of its hits, "You Are the New Day," made the expected good impression, and there was a pretty arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" to further charm the audience.

Even more fetching, and bringing into play some fun vocal techniques, was a wordless arrangement, with wah-wah mute imitations and other early-jazz novelties, of Duke Ellington's "Creole Love Call."  Finally, there was a spectacular, effusive rendition of Gershwin's "I Can't Sit Down," drawn from one of the few moments of collective happiness in the opera "Porgy and Bess." A bubbly South African encore  extended the collective happiness indelibly to the appreciative audience.

Each of the members acted as a genial spokesman from time to time. Prepared remarks with a few extemporaneous flourishes guided the audience and confirmed the gentlemen's charm, just as the music presented confirmed their skills. The golden-tour personnel is: Patrick Dunachie and Timothy Wayne-Wright, countertenors; Julian Gregory, tenor; Christopher Bruerton and Christopher Gabbitas, baritones, and Jonathan Howard, bass. 

They are certainly worthy successors to the ensemble I've cherished for many years on the 1975 LP "Courtly Pleasures." The pleasures offered by the King's Singers seem not to fade whether in or out of court. They are golden without tarnish.

Red Priest weaves its early-music spell with 21st-century charm at the Tarkington in Carmel

Red Priest is not your great-great-great-grandfather's early music group.

Enough mystery surrounds the life and career of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) that his nickname, the Red Priest, is a natural fit for an unconventional ensemble specializing in music of his era and before.

So Red Priest, a British quartet that became known to Indianapolis in the last decade through several appearances under the auspices of the Festival Music Society, returned Saturday night in a more mainstream milieu, the Classical Series of concerts presented this season by the Center for the Performing Arts.

"Gypsy Fever," as the group's presentation in the Tarkington was titled, emphasized the allure of Gypsy music for the high and low art of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Red Priest does not shy away from doubling down on the cross-pollination. The last two pieces on the program, as the quartet interpreted two composers at the summit of its repertoire — Handel and Vivaldi — freely luxuriated in a harmonious blend of Gypsy and High Baroque styles.

Retitled "Concerto for the Imaginary Gypsies," Red Priest's adaptation of Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in A minor, RV 356, was a fitting choice for such a climactic exhibition of the blurred line, in terms of energy and figuration, between the High Baroque and the more demotic musical idiom of the Gypsies. They became an influential yet marginalized people who first introduced themselves to European culture in 14th-century Hungary. The finale of the original lent itself particularly well to transformation as a vehicle for Piers Adams, the recorder player,  and Adam Summerhayes, the violinist, to mount Gypsy-oriented fantasies upon the original.

Vivaldi's life involved some wandering toward the end, but his service to a school for orphan girls in Venice produced the bulk of the repertoire by which he's known today. Handel had wanderlust in his younger years, and gained a lot in Rome absorbing Italian aesthetics and opera technique, before he moved to England and built an adoring public. His aria, "Lascia ch'io piange," formed the basis for Red Priest's next-to-last number. The group imported the Gypsy-linked Hungarian czardas into the aria's melody; Handel himself used the tune in several different places in his output. For Red Priest, the result became "Lascia chi'o Czardas." The adaptability of Baroque composers clearly is part of Red Priest's brand, and it's no more to be scorned than its eccentric, individualized garb — bright colors, bold patterns, and the sheen of leather.

G.P. Telemann ventured east to Poland to acquaint himself with what to a North German would have seemed the essence of exoticism. Red Priest's concert opened with his  Gypsy Sonata in A minor, a vivid enough piece, full of Gypsy flourishes. That seemed tame in retrospect once the quartet launched into a Heinrich Biber sonata, full of bird calls and a high level of fluttering and flamboyance. Telemann, more cosmopolitan than his contemporary J.S. Bach, was further represented, to end the first half, with two movements of a Concerto in E minor. The Presto was to every extent a "Gypsy whirligig," as a Red Priest member described it from the stage. It featured the utmost in high-speed virtuosity from both Adams and Summerhayes.

Most of the music was memorized, a considerable achievement given the note-spinning the recorder player and the violinist are assigned. Cellist Angela East shouldered a lot of the burden as well. She executed highly decorated recitative passages with the same aplomb she brought to her basso continuo responsibilities.

Harpsichordist David Wright worked from the scores so as to anchor the ensemble harmonically and rhythmically. Red Priest arrangements tend not to permit any of the ensemble members much of a chance to settle down with one type of playing or a limited function within the ensemble. Adams made use of virtually the whole family of recorders, and Summerhayes played guitar and several other instruments, too.

Especially charming in this program as a relief from the most intense music were several short pieces from Uhrovska, a town in Slovakia where Red Priest discovered some dance tunes from about 1730.  These had a salt-of-the-earth simplicity of idiom. The music was obviously designed to be catchy and get villagers on their feet or singing along. 

Typically, Red Priest's arrangements stick close to the spirit of such original material while playing freely with it so as to put an idiosyncratic stamp upon it. The upshot was exhilarating from first to last.

Butler University launches a new musical-theater initiative with "The Threepenny Opera"

Buddies across the legal divide: Macheath (Isaiah Moore) and Tiger Brown (Reily Crouse)

A famous piece explicitly formed by adaptation is properly subject to further adaptation. Thus, the modifications that audiences at Butler University's production of "The Threepenny Opera" encounter don't fall into the category of "director's opera," in which stipulated settings for the works of Verdi and Wagner, for instance, are sometimes radically altered.

In one sense, then, the famous collaboration of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill is always a director's opera whenever it is staged. And so William Fisher's stamp on this production is necessarily embedded in its presentation of the translation by Robert Macdonald (with lyrics spunkily rendered in English by Jeremy Sams).

Despite that excellence, I was reminded mainly through James Caraher's conducting of the Indianapolis Opera production of four years ago how pungent and essential Kurt Weill's music is. Caraher's animating presence for the Butler production imparts extra vivacity and dependable  support to the singers from the mostly student band.

With such vivid renditions of Weill's music as this one, it's probably true that John Gay's "Beggar's Opera," the 18th-century progenitor of the Brecht-Weill classic, lives today primarily through productions of the 1928 work of Brecht, Weill, and German-language adapter Elisabeth Hauptmann. Theater historians tell us, however, that Gay's original has held its own to a degree (George Washington, no less, was a fan), and "The Threepenny Opera" has often been disdained in comparison.

The Schrott Center for the Performing Arts is a fine place for such a production, with stage dimensions suitable to the Brecht manner of presentation: non-realistic, wedded to a vaudeville-style rendering of song and dialogue. The onstage band, behind Rob Koharchik's dark, iron-framed set of stairways and platforms (with a jail cell on the lower level present as needed), takes cues from the actors. The troupe, with stage-manager assistance, reorients the set as needed between scenes.

Fisher's direction emphasizes mugging and gestures directed toward the audience — a reminder of the "alienation effect" that Brecht pursued in order to blur the line between art and propaganda. The movement goes into and out of what is usually regarded as theater's "fourth wall."  We aren't to take these characters and their circumstances as separate from our world, in particular its inequality and unmet social needs.  Accordingly, the coronation in the background of the original here becomes a presidential inauguration, probably the most recent one.

That change is among several that is awkward at least in part, for the teeming metropolis in which this "Threepenny Opera" takes place is New York, not Washington, D.C. A gang of homeless street people on Manhattan streets on Inauguration Day, as threatened by the "beggar king" Peachum, would pose no embarrassment to the powerful in the nation's capital. Similarly, much of the lyrics and dialogue is Americanized, with a few ghosts of the English setting, such as references to the King, to men being "randy," and to an unwanted baby being disposed of "in the loo."

This potpourri of references aside, the production is assuredly better off not needing a dialect coach, an amenity that seemed to be lacking in the 2013 Indianapolis production. The urban underworld has a certain universality, after all, though no one cites it whenever "the brotherhood of man" is extolled. As a Communist, Brecht thought that point was particularly worth emphasizing.

With Glenn Williams as the slinky narrator guiding the story, the cast enacts the conflicts among the low-lifes, with the establishment represented by top cop "Tiger" Brown, played with a zesty ambiguity between "bromance" and bi-curiosity by Reily Crouse as a corrupt policeman thoroughly compromised by his affection for Macheath. The protagonist was played and sung by Isaiah Moore with a wealth of outsized expressions, especially in the songs. Though his ferocity with members of his gang was hard to believe at first, the character's manipulative selfishness and improvised suavity came through in a big way. Facing death near the end, this Macheath is both frightened and contemptuous before his delightfully staged and deliberately improbable rescue.

I must also cite the well-displayed venality and desperate self-centeredness of the Peachum family: As the paterfamilias and proprietor of a beggar-outfitting shop, Mike McClellan thundered his critique of the world he strives to succeed in in song after song, his diction and projection first-rate. "The Cannon Song," the scabrous duet with Macheath recalling their old army days, was riveting. His duets with Natalie Fischer as the sly, resentful Mrs. Peachum were among the show's highlights. When they sing slightingly of the romantic effect of "the moon over Soho," the reference neatly applies to both the London and the New York settings ("SoHo" being the decades-old designation of the Manhattan artist area "south of Houston Street").

Emma Summers struggled to project her voice at times, but her characterization of Polly triumphed in dialogue and song alike. Elizabeth Duis played her bitter rival Lucy Brown, and their interaction in duet and dialogue was scintillating, though the fast pace of the "Jealousy Duet" nearly threw them off-course. Mary Hensel as the prostitute ringleader Jenny made a particularly strong impression with her gory portrait-indictment of Macheath in the show's best-known number, the much-covered song known as "Mack the Knife." American pop singers have turned it into a celebration, but in context, the song resonates  alarmingly well in its implied challenge to  every modern society's chosen narrative of success and virtue.

Sean Imboden Big Band delivers on its promise as it settles in at the Jazz Kitchen

I first heard the Sean Imboden Big Band at the Jazz Kitchen in July. and its performance was most

Sean Imboden (left) leads his big band with somewhat different personnel earlier this year.

promising as a harbinger of excellence to come. With some of the same material and most of the same top-flight personnel, the 17-piece ensemble returned there Wednesday night.

A generously proportioned first set showed a firmer architectural approach to writing for a large group than I remembered from last summer. There were some thrilling moments, with trumpets summiting at the right places, but not too often. 

I was particularly impressed with the structure of Imboden's "Certified Organic," despite its woolly start. There the leader took one of his rare solos on tenor sax, running a few allusions to "Fascinating Rhythm" before guitarist Joel Tucker picked up a couple of his final phrases to launch his mellifluous solo. When the band returned, the ascent to a majestic ending seemed quite justified by what had gone before. 

Imboden's colleague, Matt Riggen, displayed similar formal integrity in his "Silent Aspect," which had bracing variety in the way Rob Dixon's intense soprano-sax solo yielded to Nick Tucker's low-key statement on the bass. That contrast was mirrored in the nicely balanced full-band diminuendo just before the end.

Some of the arrangements indicated how much rehearsal time for this band is at a premium. Imboden's oblique take on "Stella by Starlight" blossomed a little thickly. By the end, it was difficult to conclude whether the arrangement could use some pruning or a complex but well-integrated chart just needed more thorough preparation. 

Nonetheless, much of the music that posed difficulties as to balance and blending came off well. Imboden's ballad "Someone to Watch Over Us" featured a kind of concertino group, playing at first without the full rhythm section, of two flutes, bass clarinet, soprano sax, and arco bass. They forged a genuine unity — they were clearly listening to one another — and the piece included one of the set's several instances of smart placing of the accompaniment behind the soloist, this time for Amanda Gardier's fervent alto sax. A similar example was the way the band entered and coalesced behind the guitar solo in "Balcony."

There was no sign of uncertainty or wandering in any of the solos, probably because their contexts were always made so clear by the arrangements. The sturdiness of outings by trombonist Ernest Stuart and trumpeter John Raymond during Imboden's "Horizon" were complemented by the independent, mutually supportive writing for the band's sections.

The set ended with an arrangement of Joe Henderson's "Inner Urge" that was just as much fun as when I heard it in July.  This time, spirited exchanges between Dixon on tenor sax and LaMont Webb on alto were featured after a pungent Raymond solo.

Besides composer-conductors Imboden and Riggen, here's the complete personnel list as of this appearance by an excellent band that deserves a devoted following:

Reeds: LaMont Webb, Amanda Gardier, Rob Dixon, Matt Pivec, Evan Drybread
Trumpets: Lexie Signor, Jen Siukola, Kent Hickey, John Raymond
Trombones: Freddie Mendoza, Ernest Stuart, Ryan Fraley, Tucker Woerner
Rhythm section: Joel Tucker guitar; Shawn McGowan, piano; Nick Tucker, bass; Sam Bryson, drums