Jay Harvey Upstage

If you can imagine "A Very Bryan Chrystmas" as Santa Claus, you might find that what Clement Clarke Moore painted poetically for all time as a figure "chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf" has slimmed down and  become a little less jolly. Unlike the "Very Phoenix Xmas" series that filled our stockings a dozen times at the Phoenix Theatre under Bryan Fonseca's inspired direction, the adaptation of the format that the Fonseca Theatre Company opened Friday night renders the Santa spirit as a slender, slightly clumsy fellow who distributes his gifts less lavishly and not quite so merrily. "Last Minute Shoppers," a new work by Mark Harvey Levine, has the Magi making last-minute decisions With support for his multicultural ambitions in theater, Fonseca has brought himself up by his bootstraps to establish operations  on the city's west side, enlisting some outstanding, loyal talent to help realize his dreams after his departure from...

The late Raymond Leppard, ISO music director from 1987 to 2001. I was visiting our son William and his wife, Areli, in Mexico when news came of the death of Raymond Leppard, conductor laureate of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Upon my return, I figured that a personal remembrance for this blog would be posted too late.  But yesterday I decided that perhaps a retrospective look focused on recordings of his in my collection might be appropriate. Maybe some of my readers have these, as well as others that I'm choosing to overlook in order to bring out succinctly aspects of the Leppard legacy I most admire. His learning was immense, but lightly worn. He was a man of strong opinions on music, and, to a journalist covering him, was ceaselessly quotable. He considered France an unmusical nation; he thought Charles Ives an incompetent composer. He maintained that the works for large orchestra by the likes of Richard Strauss, Anton Bruckner, and Gustav Mahler were inappropr...

Giants in jazz have received due acknowledgment across the years, but it's worrisome too much evaluation of excellence in the music has focused on star-worship, or at least ceaselessly holding up individual contributions. That's all well and good, and I'm as much an advocate as anyone for knowing who calls the tunes, signals solos and return to the heads (where applicable), and who the sidemen are and what musical contexts they can successfully adapt to. But there's some danger in aping the pop focus on "icons" and casting in the shadow ensemble virtues that make groups with common, well-honed experience preferable to pick-up bands, no matter what expertise each component brings to the table. The Tucker Bros. put it all together in "Two Parts." The band's the thing, in other words. And in the way the Tucker Brothers' quartet coalesces in recordings or on the bandstand, we have a local object lesson, in 21st-century terms, in what make...

The marquee composition on an Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra program waggishly titled "Czech Mates" was composed by a North German who settled in Vienna and looked eastward musically now and then. Marjorie Lange Hanna's  ICO tenure is as long as anyone's. Johannes Brahms' Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra has a Hungarian flavor in the finale, which puts it roughly in the neighborhood of the Czech homeland of Bohuslav Martinu and Leos Janacek, two other composers featured in the November 23 concert at Butler University's Schrott Center for the Arts . The remaining piece comes by its Czech associations through its nickname: W.A. Mozart's "Prague" Symphony (No. 38 in D major, K. 504). The nickname is authentic, unlike many such monikers, in that it was composed for its premiere in the Bohemian  city where the Austrian composer's later work was well received. Andres Cardenes, 1986 IVCI bronze medalist. For the so...

Art Blakey said many good things, but among them was not "Music washes away the dust of everyday life." Yet a concert in centennial tribute to the drummer-bandleader Friday night at the Jazz Kitchen accomplished The Indianapolis Jazz Collective played an Art Blakey tribute show to a packed house. such a cleansing for me and the capacity audience, swelled by supporters of the sponsoring Indianapolis Jazz Foundation. The misattribution of the original thought of Berthold Auerbach, a 19th-century German writer, sometimes sticks "from the soul" in the middle of that quotation, as usually translated. Blakey would have endorsed the complete version, too, and the band led by Rob Dixon put substance behind it in a generously proportioned first set. (The Auerbach quote has great legs, having been attributed to Pablo Picasso as well — and even, thanks to appropriation of the writer's last name, to the immortal Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach. Can't you jus...

Jason Marsalis took care of business with his Goodman-inspired quartet. Explicitly moving forward and backward over time in his set list, Jason Marsalis played an illuminating program with his quartet Sunday night at t he Jazz Kitchen . The 42-year-old vibraphonist (also known as a drummer through such connections as the Marcus Roberts Trio, heard at Clowes Hall in 2015 ) immediately paid tribute to the Benny Goodman combo of sainted memory in taking the stage. Hallowed names of Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and Gene Krupa were invoked to refurbish memory lane at the start. With Joe Goldberg on clarinet, Kris Tokarski on piano, and Gerald T. Watkins on drums, Marsalis resurrected "After You've Gone" and "Sweet Sue, Just You" flawlessly to open the show. Spiffy coordination, a wealth of improvisatory ideas, and flashiness linked to a heart-tug or two ruled the performances in the manner of the model quartet of the late 1930s. Using soft malle...

Nemorino and Adina negotiate their way toward love, using Dulcamara's car as a prop. The definite article has been lopped off the English title in Indianapolis Opera's publicity for its production of Gaetano Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore," but that's pretty much the extent of any damage to the amiable 1832 romantic farce that the company is offering to open its 2019-2020 season. The production of "The Elixir of Love" (sung in Italian, with surtitles in English) has one more performance at the Tarkington in Carmel's Center for the Performing Arts . There's some mild updating that allows for an outreach to the Indianapolis brand of motorsports: A vintage car comes onstage as the quack doctor Dulcamara makes his entrance, pushed by Indycar driver Zach Veatch, appearing in his opera debut and probably happy not to have a singing role. The sets and costuming looked cozy and idiomatic. The action now takes place in 1910, and the canny...

Early in his tenure as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Krzysztof Urbanski put his stamp on programming with the inclusion of music from his homeland, Poland — just as one of his predecessors, the late Raymond Leppard, included more English music than ISO patrons had been used to hearing. Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) Now in the twilight of his time at the ISO's artistic helm, Urbanski this weekend sheds light on a little-known countryman who was a citizen of the Soviet Union for most of his life. Mieczyslaw Weinberg was previously known to me only by one work, his sixth string quartet, as performed by the Pacifica Quartet i n its series of Cedille recordings, "The Soviet Experience." Taking in the symphonic Weinberg at Hilbert Circle Theatre with previous knowledge of this particular string quartet revealed to me the signature style of an inviting musical mind. Symphony No. 3, op. 45, is a lavish, unexpected exemplar of the ISO's c...

Environmental consciousness has been raised across the world in recent years, so it should come as no surprise that the relationship between human and natural health gives an extra layer of pertinence today to Richard Wagner's "Parsifal." Parsifal (Chris Lysack) regards the recovered sacred spear under eyes of Kundry (Renee Tatum). The space in which the action of the opera takes place is particularly germane to Indiana University Jacobs School of Music 's production of the work, which received its second of three performances Wednesday evening at the Musical Arts Center. S. Katy Tucker's set and projection designs brilliantly enhance the significance of the action and the primacy of a timeless arena for salvation. The quest to restore health to a community threatened by human weakness and the black magic of Klingsor retains its centrality, but the theme of restoration in the wider world also receives emphasis. In the last act, the approaching spring gradu...

Richard Wagner was a child when Indiana University was founded in 1820, not a prodigy on the order of his The Flower Maidens work to get the attention of Parsifal (Chris Lysack) near contemporary Mendelssohn, and in fact requiring many years to secure his reputation as a musician to reckon with. The connection between his eventual eminence as a ground-breaking composer and the educational establishment's growth over two centuries runs through IU's history of mounting his last opera, "Parsifal," almost annually from 1949 to 1976. After 43 years of turning its attention to other operas, IU is observing its bicentennial with a new production of the work on the current season. It opened last Sunday, where it will be repeated Wednesday (when I will see it) and conclude Saturday night at the Musical Arts Center on the Bloomington campus. It is being directed by Chris Alexander, whose extensive credits in Germany preceded multiple engagements by the Seattle Opera ...

Frank Glover as composer, bandleader and clarinetist built a short discography on Owl Studios early in the century that displayed him as an integral figure in an extension of jazz into contemporary sensibilities with a fresh way of blending improvisation and composition. His could well be the best possible advance on such mixing since the somewhat staid, tentative outreach toward a jazz/classical liaison decades ago by such well-schooled musicians as Gunther Schuller, John Lewis, and J.J. Johnson. Frank Glover lends urgency and fresh chops to the clarinet The new recording, like Owl's "Politico" and "Abacus," displays the cinematic flow of Glover's compositions — quick cuts, dissolves, panoramas and close-ups — as well as sensitivity to movement that allows a wealth of imagery to come to the listener's mind. "Two contemporary ballets" is the descriptive phrase Glover applies to both works. The emotional palette evident in them complement...

The last time Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Krzysztof Urbanski collaborated in an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Jean-Yves Thibaudet: In the driver's seat for Ravel and Connesson program, the vehicle also hinted at warm Franco-American relationships in music. Then there was a meeting of minds around George Gershwin's Concerto in F . As the program note of this weekend's concerts makes clear, Gershwin and his older French contemporary Maurice Ravel had a mutual admiration society, though their acquaintance was slight, centered on a New York meeting in 1928. A common interest in jazz and in melody helped to bond them. Thibaudet, himself an exemplar of Franco-American amity, maintains personal and artistic homes in Los Angeles and his native Lyon, France. Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major opened the concert Friday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre. The program, also including works by Guillaume Connesson and Claude Debussy, will be repeated at 5:30 this afternoon. In t...

History may not really repeat itself, but it tends to self-amplify. Issues and personalities, shifting cultural values and resistance to change, the opposition of bigotry and tolerance, keep recycling. Progress, however defined, is inevitably compromised and flecked with unwelcome reminders, sometimes freshly outfitted to accommodate revived prejudices.   Group portrait of the living past: actors Cameron Stuart Bass, Maeghan Looney, Don Farrell, and Cynthia Collins as characters in "Alabama Story." From the heyday of segregation, "Alabama Story," the current Actors Theatre of Indiana production, revisits a controversy of the 1950s. Seismic shifts in the advance toward racial justice marked a decade in which the Old South sought to hold on to the ideology of segregation. Suddenly a children's book by Garth Williams moved to the forefront of culture wars because of the happy union it depicts of one black and one white rabbit. Kenneth Jones has fashioned...

Reaching across four decades of piano music in Indianapolis, on Wednesday the American Pianists Association brought back at Indiana Landmarks Center six of its top  competition winners to celebrate its 40th anniversary. For a long time, the APA, established in 1979 as the Beethoven Foundation, de-emphasized the competitive aspect, preferring to present its participants to the public as festival programming from which honors happened to emerge. Jonathan Shames stressed the newness of Copland. But a focus on winners was inevitable, partly as a way to drive audience and donor interest in the organization. So that's where the spotlight shone at the APA's first "Grand Encounters" concert of the 2019-2020 season. To emphasize the legacy, two of the six pianists brought back to town were the pioneers in their two categories: Jonathan Shames (classical, 1981) and Jim Pryor (jazz, 1992). Their appearances were notable for the projection of personality. In both cases...

A comforting cliche about successful marriage is that it's not two people looking into each other's eyes, but two people looking in the same direction. David MacGregor 's "Vino Veritas," Phoenix Theatre 's current production, reveals that Lauren and Phil started out with the deep mutual gaze common to many couples falling in love. But what emerges in this sometimes disturbing two-act comedy is that the essential looking in the same direction can gradually ossify into tunnel vision. Then neither may notice that the outlook has become wall-eyed or cross-eyed. They look off elsewhere, Lauren makes pitch for quaffing an exotic wine to husband and guests on Halloween. and the binocular focus turns dangerously blurry. The importance of fully functioning peripheral vision in matters of the heart is underlined as this comfortably situated middle-class couple welcomes a neighboring couple into their home for an intimate prelude to a large, traditional Hallowee...

A fine example of the mastery that Jack Everly brings to pops programming at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra is the way he connects what a symphony orchestra does to a wide swath of popular culture. Jack Everly, the canny maestro of ISO Pops Unfailing in his geniality and expertness as podium host, Everly on Friday night conducted the ISO in a Pops Series concert putting musicians in the spotlight as soloists for "Cinematic Symphony." The alliteration of the title is a handy reminder of the history of symphonic scoring as essential to the movie experience. In recent years, those textures have largely yielded to electronic scoring and pop songs. The symphonic bond dates from the "silents" era, when D.W. Griffith — a pioneer in this aspect as in so many others in the art of film-making — began the tradition of commissioning musical scores to accompany films. It's a shame this practice, which became indelible once moving pictures found their voice, is a...