'Primary Colors': A trumpet-keyboard duo recording that stretches into sonic experimentation

Sometimes cleaning out a basement yields more than junk or sentimental knickknacks. John Vanore, whose
career as trumpeter also rests on the little big band he directed called Abstract Truth, dug out some cassette tapes he made with keyboardist Ron Thomas in the mid-1980s.

John Vanore revived duo sessions

Digitizing  these sessions and making them public has yielded "Primary Colors", three-quarters of an hour's worth of stimulating dialogues between Thomas and Vanore. The live studio recording is subject to some overlays and occasional expansion of the natural resonance of the acoustic instruments; recording and mixing credit goes to Terry Hoffman.

At the forefront are Vanore's horns — the trumpet and its mellow-voiced cousin, the flugelhorn — with most of the keyboard variety enabled by synthesizer and studio legerdemain, like the cymbals that decorate the opening track, Thomas' "Final Dawn." The moody, restless accompaniment complements Vanore's lyrical tone, and the long-phrased ballad setting exhibits his comfortable control. Both horns get some simultaneous interplay in Lionel Richie's "Lady." The piano is loaded with extra resonance, and overall the treatment seems a trifle aimless for the sake of sound. Fortunately, the disc's sonic woolgathering is confined to "Lady."

The most extensive outreach works pretty well in Vanore's "Origins of Rude," a salute to Miles Davis' funky electronic period. The foreground is cluttered over a bass ostinato, and Thomas sports an electric harpsichord timbre. The highly charged mix eases up as it goes along, becoming less aggressive before subsiding into a fadeout.

I prefer the more mainstream side of these dialogues, though it must be conceded that adventures in studio experimentation rooted in jazz of 35 years ago lend this disc an inviting novelty.  Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays" finds the duo conventional in delivering a straight-ahead performance, with the freshness contributed mainly via a "hopping" treatment of the familiar melody. Vanore's crisp articulation is notable, but he doesn't allow that to lead him toward overaccenting the line. He displays a good low register, and here and elsewhere seems quite comfortable all along the spectrum of both instruments, confining higher blasts to "Origins of Rude."

Vanore is imaginative in a rubato solo cadenza to launch another evergreen, "Secret Love" (Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster), alluding to the melody slyly before falling into tempo with Thomas's assistance and delivering the theme. After solos, the two come up with an attractive coda that amounts to the perfect exit line for "Primary Colors."

Carmel Symphony Orchestra, Actors Theatre of Indiana join forces in Sondheim's 'dark operetta'

If you have a good feeling about Valentine's Day, you might well think of it as having its own season — a small

Sweeney Todd (Don Farrell) sings in praise of his "friends," the razors of his trade.

one, of course, and not for the sake of florists, candy sellers, and greeting-card makers, but all for love.

So maybe Friday night, a week after February 14, I was still basking in its glow, oddly enough, to take in "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" as a love story. Love thwarted and violated, love enduring in distorted form, love misapplied and criminally directed. Love, the companion of lies and madness. Love emerging somehow from dire threats, triumphing against all odds.

What Stephen Sondheim called his "dark operetta" enjoys a semi-staged production, whose second and final performance will be tonight at the Palladium, with Actors Theatre of Indiana in collaboration with the Carmel Symphony Orchestra. Coincidentally, the performances come the weekend after the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's accompanied showings of "Casablanca," whose score by Max Steiner is one of the film classic's glories. "At the age of ten, I was more a fan of Korngold than of Kern, more of Steiner than of [Richard] Strauss," Sondheim writes in his enthralling volume of self-commentary and second thoughts, "Finishing the Hat."

In other words, as a child, the major creator of American musical theater in the late 20th century found neither stage musicals nor classical music as attractive as movies. And that interest had something to do with the pervasive underscoring in the classic film scores by Steiner, Erich Korngold, and Bernard Herrmann. It carried over into Sondheim's 1979 masterpiece (to Hugh Wheeler's book, derived from Christopher Bond's play, with Jonathan Turick's orchestrations), which is so magnificently represented in the Carmel production.

Thus it's a signal achievement that the splendid Carmel Symphony occupies most of the Palladium stage and that such care has been lavished upon the music under the dialogue as much as on the songs. Janna Hymes, the CSO's music director, conducted a fit and febrile rendering of the score, well-coordinated with the cast, supplemented in song, chiefly "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," by the black-robed Indianapolis Arts Chorale in the gallery.

The portrayal of the title character by Don Farrell had a dark charisma that never flagged. The hypnotic intensity of "My Friends," the barber's paean to the tools of his trade, united the character's weird obsession with razors to nostalgia for his old life in London and the bitter retribution he plans to exact for his forced exile years before. "He handles them as if they were sacred objects and sings softly," the stage direction reads. It was one of many moments when Farrell completely inhabited the demon persona essential to the role.

This is vital, because though the show has loads of humor (much of it gruesome) and barbed commentary on social injustice rivaling "The Threepenny Opera," it is fundamentally a serious examination of love gone haywire. The former Benjamin Barker was a family man, no doubt about it. London's upper crust, personified here by a lecherous judge, has decreed that the happiness of the lower orders may be obliterated with impunity, and the barber and his young family are this story's hapless victims. Now with a new identity as Sweeney Todd, the convict returned from Australian exile is ready to set matters right after his own fashion.

Mrs. Lovett envisions life by the sea, but Sweeney Todd's vistas are sepulchral.

Broadening his quest for vengeance after an accidental failure to slit the judge's throat, Todd resolves to subject any and all customers to the closest of shaves. In the equivalent of an operatic scena titled "Epiphany," Todd's demon takes charge, and Farrell's performance of this number was a highlight of Friday's performance. It properly cast a shadow over the mirthful duet that follows, "A Little Priest," in which Todd and the seedy pie baker Nelly Lovett celebrate with punning amusement the expansive business they intend to set up, rendering serial murder into a marketable viand.

Richard J Roberts' stage direction seethes with appropriate action in both numbers. Throughout, his skill and imagination certainly push the "semi-staged" description past the halfway point; a walkway around behind the orchestra gives the action breadth, but most of it takes place right before us on Paul Bernard Killian's appropriately sketchy set, in which the tonsorial parlor, the restaurant, and the basement kitchen are necessarily set side by side. We have to imagine the operation of gravity (the physical kind), though the gravity of the Todd/Lovett scheme is never in doubt, as dispatched customers are dumped down the chute past the dining room and into an ever-stoked baking oven.

Judy Fitzgerald embodies Mrs. Lovett in all her loquacious Cockney verve and resourcefulness. Love is the engine driving her involvement with the touchy Todd, and Fitzgerald caught both the sly temporizing and the shabby dreams that motivate the amoral baker. Every telltale facial expression and gesture was delightfully in place. The other ATI co-founder, Cynthia Collins, plays the Beggar Woman whose real identity hovers ghost-like over the plot. Her sporadic intrusions onto the scene, with her mental distraction hinting at the bad business afoot on Fleet Street, always brought goosebumps.

In other roles, Mathew Conwell and Elizabeth Hutson gave the right optimistic ardor and youthful energy to the nearly doomed couple displaying the hopeful side of love. Their singing was of a buoyant piece with their  ingenuous portrayals. Tim Fullerton presented a looming figure of menace as the corrupt, lascivious Judge Turpin, with Michael Elliott as the complaisant Beadle, a minor official in a position to create major trouble for the meat-pie business. Mario Almonte III rates a mention for the comic gusto he brought to the role of Adolfo Pirelli, a Todd rival and snake-oil charlatan who's made short work of. His murder spurs the new business and allows it to pick up the services of the simple-minded Tobias, played with nuanced pathos by David Cunningham ("Not While I'm Around" is perhaps the show's one breakout song, though it's much more affecting in context).

On a technical note, the face microphones are of course necessary to allow the cast to project above the orchestra. That's a given: The problem is that some of the patter-song lyrics get blurred, though Mrs. Lovett's mostly come through heroically. More crucially, Sondheim favors spotlighting individual contributions in choruses, and these almost never stand out: The street brouhaha around Pirelli and the later meat-pie raving of satisfied  diners ("God, That's Good!") are rather stewed together, and the audience can be only partly aware of this particular recipe in Sondheim's master cookbook.

For the most part, the seasoning is piquant and judiciously applied throughout.  The cinematic progression of scenes consistently catches one up in the music as well as the story. Sondheim's final word on the work, which this production honors expertly, runs like this: "What 'Sweeney Todd' really is is a movie for the stage." As such, it's every bit as much a love story — in its own weird way — as "Casablanca." Season's greetings!

Bass player Max Gerl, heading quartet, salutes Georgian capital in 'Tbilisi'

The Georgian capital is spelled two different ways on the jacket for this

Bass is the place: Max Gerl shows mastery of plugged-in and unplugged kinds.

disc (Dolfin Records), and I chose to go with Tbilisi, which online occurred more than "Tblisi." The three I's have it. 

That's the only conspicuous error in this release on a Dallas-based label. The music inside is engaging. Max Gerl is a bassist of great facility and expressive range, especially on the electric instrument.

 "Tbilisi" as a title tune on this short disc shows off his colleague on tenor sax, Aaron Shaw, in busy dialogue with drummer Mike Mitchell. When it's time for the leader to take the spotlight, his drive and wealth of fast-paced ideas are immediately evident.

Gerl's acoustic bass states the tune of "It Happened to Me" and the piano sits out for a while while the trio fills the room edge to edge a la Ornette Coleman. Paul Cornish makes up for lost time once the piano gets involved.

On "Suntrip,"  Shaw's tenor, whose distinctiveness I admire for the most part, reveals a limitation in tone for this kind of cosmic exploration. He displays a broad sound that suits the piece, but little depth. Three monstrous Coltrane-like dimensions are called for in this sort of thing, and Shaw doesn't command them. 

The finale, "Counter," opens with a short figure introduced by the piano, joined hand-in-glove by the sax; then it settles into a heady pace sustained by the quartet in full cry. There's another fine solo by the leader, his electric bass unfolding phrases in nimble octaves. The pianist picks up on the obsessive nature of the tune's opening figure in his solo. The ensemble restates the head material, and, though I'm normally no fan of fadeouts, resorting to that practice here seems just about right, giving the listener a chance to exhale.

It may be more a matter of taste than a persistent flaw that the recording quality seems acoustically flat and unresonant. There are silences that don't hang in the air naturally, as if the engineer intentionally cut the microphones right after a note's release. Fans of the piano may particularly be aware of its shallowness and lack of tonal bloom. If you adjust your ears to that quality, however, there is much to enjoy musically over the course of this concise program.

The system in a closed car: Monument Theatre Company presents 'Dutchman'

Lula (Dani Gibbs) feeds Clay (Jamaal McCray) the forbidden fruit in America's lost Eden.

Traveling by myself, I once toured George Washington's estate, Mount Vernon, on a warm day when the grounds were streaming with visitors. You could have private moments outside or join a crowd lining up to go through the living quarters and other buildings. I was standing looking at the slave burial ground, and about thirty feet away a solitary black man, surveying the same scene, was musing wearily aloud: "Buried without their names — they didn't even leave them with their names."

Wanting to say something  sympathetic, I halted because it would sound like a lecture. It would have come across as "white-splaining" for me to say something about the system that worked those departed against their will and beyond their control, then buried them unidentified. It would have sounded insensitive to ask the rhetorical question: how could the owners of these people have memorialized them as individuals when they had been considered property all their lives?

When he still used his birth name LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka wrote "Dutchman," the white-hot one-act play that Monument Theatre Company is presenting at Indy Convergence through next weekend. The play homes in on a subway confrontation between two young people, a black man and a white woman. But it is caught up in the larger symbolism that relationship implies, and it has much to say about the system that has extended from slavery through its aftermath, up to the present day.

Jones was attracted to the larger implications of American race relations, which fed acute suspicion of the integrationist mindset. Shortly after "Dutchman" he left behind his bohemian lifestyle and Jewish wife to embrace black nationalism. He had been the foremost African-American ornament in the literary counterculture, and his drastic shift in priorities made him something of a Lost Leader, to borrow Robert Browning's designation of the aging Wordsworth. Jones' poetry, having shown signs of a whimsical, fragmented identity, became an explicit revolutionary tool, in Baraka's view and that of his associates. It also veered into anti-Semitism, which was to interfere with honors some felt he was entitled to later in life.

But the same system held sway throughout Baraka's evolution; the author's perspective on it changed. The changes are adumbrated in "Dutchman." Wrestling with myths that are part of racial oppression, Jones upends the dangerous stereotype of the rapacious black male lusting after white women. In this play, Lula is the sexual aggressor while Clay, the middle-class student in suit and tie, is uncomfortably cast as the victim of her desire. Her temptress style is symbolically linked to another myth: Eve, partaking of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and persuading the first man to share in what became known as the original sin. Apples are munched with gusto as the dialogue gets under way, soon to be discarded as the interplay becomes more explicit.

"Dutchman" has the feel of a work in which the author is working something out for himself, based on his experience in and out of books and art.  The characters are vivid stand-ins for perspectives that have long shaped American race relations. Clay's occasional references to Jews hint at what became explicit animosity in Baraka's poetry. Clay's celebration of black musical icons — Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker — chafes at white fans' absorption of them and their likely misunderstanding of their cultural significance. Jones worked these themes hard in two 1960s books of sociology and music criticism: "Blues People" and "Black Music."

Directed with admirable focus and momentum by Shawn Whitsell, Jamaal McCray and Dani Gibbs handle well the range of exhibitionism and reserve the characters go through, provoked by each other and (more important) America's unresolved racial divisions. Fewer instances of the mocking chuckle or snort Lula tags onto nearly everything she says at first would have been welcome, but there is no question the character came on as a full-throttle femme fatale.

Counterpointed to her in the performance I saw Saturday are the caution and curiosity of Clay, obviously brought up to safeguard upward mobility while steering clear of white supremacy's obstacles as much as possible. He is goaded about his name, his fashion sense, his manners, and his social position. When he explodes, Lula falls silent; Gibbs' facial expressions aptly altered between pouting and fear. And McCray intensified his portrayal to make Clay's vision of murder credibly linked to his freedom. "Dutchman" suggests that neither incremental change nor righteous violence is the path forward.

Lacking the presence of a crowd of subway passengers onstage, the production's audience becomes fellow travelers. If you sit in a conspicuous place, you may find Clay in your face and tearing your program (standing in for the script's New York Times) from your hands, as I did. In a play so obviously symbolic, like a lab experiment in racism, the feeling that this drama is playing to an empty subway car is not a major issue. The battle is joined, and just before the final blackout, Lula is preparing to snare another victim (Deont'a Stark).

Almost contemporaneous with "Dutchman" is a Jones novel titled "The System of Dante's Hell." It's not a good novel, but a lively (and deadly) pastiche of scenes from the Newark ghetto of Jones' background — a kind of Dostoyevskyan notes from underground. But the title and some aspects of its structure reveal the author's consciousness that the system was rigged against black people, and that the pathology had been internalized.

Whether enslaved or subsequently, African-Americans still wrestle with a vast conspiracy against their full humanity. The man I wished I'd spoken to at Mount Vernon focused on the visible lack of this recognition at the slave burial ground, but I suspect he knew deeply what a major part of his own living heritage that anonymity was. Jones/Baraka chafed against the system that kept the conspiracy alive; he went in a direction it may be presumptuous of me to call wrong. But he continued to pursue a struggle that had a strong sense of justice behind it. If you attend "Dutchman," you will be powerfully forced to examine the myth he applied to that struggle.

ISO Film Series: Reveling in Max Steiner's score for 'Casablanca'

Filling the Hilbert Circle Theatre to the rafters, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra presented its first film accompaniment of the New Year Friday night to a showing of the classic "Casablanca."

Max Steiner conducting a studio orchestra in one of his scores.

Some people put the 1942 movie near the top of their  favorites. It must also be near the summit of any list, if anyone has bothered to count, of widely known lines and phrases from the script. It's a love story nuanced and genuine enough  to suit Valentine's weekend (there's another showing tonight) and also pertinent today as the free world largely dreads a shift toward totalitarianism.

Jack Everly conducts the ISO's performance of the movie's music, featuring one of the prolific Max Steiner's most memorable scores. A native of Austria, thoroughly trained and lauded in music from his youth, the immigrant Steiner pioneered symphonic scoring for motion pictures shortly after the Silent Era. "King Kong" (1933) is often mentioned as a milestone in a specialty that was developed by many others as well for about three decades. The 1960s saw a shift to pop music and electronic scoring that has sustained itself for the last half-century.

Steiner made full use of two tunes he didn't create, cued by their full versions in the movie: "La Marseillaise," the national anthem of the French republic, and "As Time Goes By," a philosophical love song from 1931 by Herman Hupfeld. The latter is the signature "our song" of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), whose interrupted romance in Paris drives the plot of "Casablanca." It's sung, initially to Rick's displeasure, by Sam, who left France with his boss to become an entertainment fixture at the piano of Blaine's new club, Rick's Cafe Americain, in Casablanca, Morocco.

But Steiner also exploits the melodies motivically, after the example of Richard Wagner. This means a familiar phrase may act as a jog to the memory (leitmotif) and also as a reminder of the central love affair's fragility, how subject it is to undermining. Turmoil caused by Nazi Germany's wartime conquest of its neighbors involved millions, and one of the ethical triumphs of "Casablanca" is its recognition of this, however much we may want to focus on Rick, Ilsa, and Ilsa's husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). As Rick puts it, in one of the film's memorable lines: “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

Thus, a cadence from the Hupfeld song will sometimes end wryly, quizzically or portentously in a harmonic shift. The swelling notes of romance, so well played Friday as centered in the ISO strings, are rarely given a blithe setting — chiefly in the flashbacks to Rick and Ilsa's happy times in Paris. Steiner's score is adept in "uh-oh" moments, as when Ilsa unexpectedly enters Rick's Cafe Americain, surprising the proprietor, who famously laments later while binging: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

From the time she enters the club through her departure, the underscoring is superb in conveying the unsettling effect of a reunion Rick never expected and never wanted. But something approaching closure, a staple of fiction on the screen or on the page, will not be denied. And from the first scene on, the exotic milieu is conveyed by Steiner's occasional suggestion of Arab music, recurring when the action briefly moves to the Blue Parrot, a rival nightclub, where the manipulative owner Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) swats flies when he's not scheming.

As directed by Michael Curtiz, the macro and micro worlds continually intersect in "Casablanca," and Steiner's score reflects the mingling. When the band strikes up the Marseillaise to drown out a fatherland song by a Nazi contingent under Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), the orchestration grows in full glory to supplement the on-screen singing. It's one of the most moving episodes in the film; it never fails to be spine-tingling even when you can see it coming. It's especially so with a "live" orchestra. And it must be said that the subtitles throughout are valuable, because you can hardly expect actual onstage musicians to somehow fold their sound under the dialogue as it would be when "Casablanca" is seen with the soundtrack as originally recorded. You're there to hear things you might not have noticed via video or in the movie theater.

The whole of the second act, when the cat-and-mouse game between Rick and Capt. Renault, Casablanca's prefect (Claude Rains), moves toward a climax, is a masterly landscape of musical suspense. In one of classic Hollywood's most memorable finales, the plane bearing Viktor and Ilsa away takes off in the fog, as Rick and Renault fade from view, walking along the tarmac, contemplating the beginning of a beautiful friendship, free of the troubled wartime city. The orchestra swells, as only it can when present before us, while our view cuts to the quaint projection of "The End" on the screen.

Dance Kaleidoscope celebrates love of country and those other kinds, too

"American Valentine" is how the holiday weekend is being celebrated by Dance Kaleidoscope on the main stage at Indiana Repertory Theatre.

The title encapsulates the balance of the program's two acts between the "Our America" celebration by the company's dancers in pieces designed for last year's Indy Fringe Festival and diverse DK repertoire dances by artistic director David Hochoy and two guest choreographers under the title "Facets of Love."

Jillian Godwin's "A Home for All" exemplifies the choreographer's distrust of barriers.

We are accustomed to thinking of "anthology" as a designation for a collection of literary pieces. However enthralling such volumes can be, they are a product of selections marketed around an attractive theme. "American Love" is an anthology that returns us to the word's roots, from the Greek meaning a gathering of flowers. The organic imagery is important, because this program is a fragrant bouquet of diverse lived experience expressed in dance form.

Bouquets have long been a major feature of Valentine's Day, but this gathering of cultivated tributes to love deserves to move to the front of the display. In the dancers' half of the program, idealism rules the day. This is clear from the spoken introductions to each piece, testimony to the choreographers' remarkable verbal eloquence, which almost matches the kind they have set upon their colleagues.

I want to hold up some of the stronger impressions "Our America" made on me as "American Love" premiered Thursday night. The lengthy title of retired dancer Mariel Greenlee's show-opening piece, "We hold these dream to be self evident," signals its blend of one of the Declaration of Independence's most famous phrases and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" 1963 speech at the Washington Mall. The choreography puts equal stress on the holding and the dreaming in a freshly ceremonial way.

Pointed social commentary vitalizes a few of the current DK dancers' creations. As it did memorably at its Fringe premiere, Missy Thompson's "The Jones Effect" skewers the "keeping-up-with-the-Joneses" consumerist drive while not getting silly about it. Social regimentation, often entered into voluntarily, is reflected in movement in which nonconformity vies with individual self-assertion.

The satirical element reminded me of a 1960s wall poster, crowded with identical hippie figures, marching in lockstep under the slogan "Protest Against the Rising Tide of Conformity." It was a dig at a widely seen poster carrying the same slogan, with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez posed on either side. The American reality has long been stocked with competing stances on that idea; nearly everyone is inclined to assert themselves until they realize they are doing so a little too much.

Similarly juxtaposed viewpoints clash in Manuel Valdes' powerful "In the Midst of a Storm." Six drab-garbed

Kaleidoscopic patterning: Taylor and King duet.

women move under oppression in the opening scene, their individuality muted, only to then declare their liberation, their limbs free and with skirts emphasizing freedom of movement. In "A Home for All," Jillian Godwin has used a long piece of fabric to represent a wall whose initial dividing function among a large group is ambiguous, eventually closing in around one dancer expressing resurgent determination to rise over the barrier.

Three other pieces focused on celebration: Aaron Steinberg's "Boatman's Dance" used Aaron Copland's folk-song setting to shape an exuberant, idiomatic work for two couples; Paige Robinson's  "Open Horizon" uses part of Ferde Grofe's "Grand Canyon Suite" to send three women in circling energy about the stage like Botticelli's 'Three Graces"  animated, following the concentrated force of a violin cadenza interpreted with her usual intensity by Jillian Godwin; and the finale, Stuart Coleman's "Kaleidoscope." The work outfits a sizable ensemble in glowing pastel colors that contrast from dancer to dancer. The lively score by Peter Boyer, in a compound meter (3-3-3-2) well-designed and -executed, has a charming respite in the middle, a duet featuring the deft partnership of Kieran King and Sarah Taylor.

The second half brought forward in concentrated form several displays of Hochoy's imagination as applied to the theme of love over the years. The capstone was the "Fire" movement from "The Four Elements," one of the most expansive and emotionally charged of the artistic director's more abstract pieces, joined at the hip to music.

Set to a pulsating performance by Tito Puente's foundational mambo band,  "Fire" is also a sublime representative of the collective wisdom of Hochoy and his longtime collaborators, lighting designer Laura E. Glover and costume designer Cheryl Sparks. The ensemble unity of the current DK company is as good as ever, and its virtuosity in this piece is relentlessly exercised. What a steady blaze in our hearts this piece stoked beyond all the flickering love cliches that light up Valentine's Day!

Earlier in the program, the audience is treated to a few incandescent duets by Hochoy. Each had its distinction. "Some Enchanted Evening" put Aaron Steinberg in sympathetic partnership with Sarah Taylor, who made the most of Hochoy's exalted concept by seeming to float on winds of enchantment. Less ethereal duo performances included the steamy "Seasons Tango," to music of Astor Piazzolla, danced by Marie Kuhns and Stuart Coleman, seasoned with a drizzle of wit. To amend the J. Geils song title, love also winks.

Guest vocalist Doug Dilling sings "End of the World," danced by Stuart Coleman and Kieran King.

To start the program's second half off in the mood of classical romance, Hochoy has brought back his "Romeo and Juliet" balcony scene as a vehicle for Aleksa Lukasiewicz and Kieran King, to which they bring both ardor and nobility. For a dynamic prelude, he uses his setting of the Montague-Capulet street brawl that symbolizes the feud making the love affair so dangerous. Hochoy's humor, a resource he can draw upon with the same degree of commitment, is showcased in "Stand By Your Man," an updated version of the eternal triangle, with Missy Thompson, Manuel Valdes, and Aaron Steinberg drolly effective. Guy Clark's costumes are rightly a lampoon on country chic. Obliquely, the setting undercuts the retro sexism of Tammy Wynette's singing.

Hochoy's guests vary the program even from a style as capacious as his: Cynthia Pratt moves across a spectrum of three duets in "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." The versatility of the choreography for three couples both celebrates the song's message and usefully relieves the Roberta Flack recording of some of its iconic dead-seriousness. And for a sassy contrast, another three couples cavort zestfully to Michael Jackson's performance of "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," as choreographed by Nicholas A. Owens.

"American Valentine" is a true anthology. The kind you might find delightful to read is another matter entirely. This one blooms through Sunday. Take time to smell the roses.
 


[Photos by Crowe's Eye Photography]

Crimes of Greed and Passion: A visionary warning of the dread many feel about still more Trump

Zaniness rules in Civic Theatre's 'Much Ado About Nothing'

The director's note in the "Much Ado About Nothing" program book gets directly to the historic significance of the Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre's current production.

It's the first full-length Shakespeare production ever for the company that began life 105 years ago as Indianapolis Civic Theatre, Emily Rogge Tzucker notes. The second performance I saw Saturday night revealed a production approach that spoke to Civic's broad appeal to its loyal public: Go deep on occasion, but bring instantly communicable theater values to the fore.

When it comes to comedy, underline it and maximize its connection with ordinary feelings. Give it a look that's strong on style: With scenic and lighting design by Ryan Koharchik, this production basks in Southern California sunlight, with a curvy stucco house front in Mission Revival and topiaries artfully placed around the yard — the home of media mogul Leonato (the play's governor of Messina). The action has been updated to right after World War II, placed for us immediately after a pre-curtain Swing Era soundtrack by interpolated radio patter from a deejay who calls himself "Billy Shakes." Multiple adjustments have to be made subsequently in the audience's mind: references to armor, swords, princes, and lords remain in the text, as they must.

Civic's "Much Ado": Benedick and Beatrice mix repartee with true romance.

Though the playwright drew upon ancient stories of marriageable women unjustly accused of infidelity, with the mistake eventually corrected for the sake of a happy ending, "Much Ado About Nothing" has long charmed readers and playgoers with its livelier subplot. So it's no departure from the play's essence that the feisty relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is foremost in Civic's production.

Antagonistic at the start, with every conversation striking sparks, the poor little rich girl Beatrice and the young officer Benedick eventually cast aside their warrior masks to reveal their true love. Each prompted by friends to be certain of the other's devotion, they are also moved by how the straightforward love of the young aristocrat Claudio (Nicholas Gibbs) and Hero, Leonato's daughter (Carly Masterson), has become undone by a plot against their marriage. Once that's set right and the villainy exposed, the well-practiced mutual resistance of Benedick and Beatrice falls away.

John Kern and Sara Castillo Dandurand are the unlikely lovers in roles that have provided a durable rom-com model for generations, fed by Hollywood. The director acknowledges this as the chief motive in her change of setting. Her interest in projecting that initial hostility was evident in the performance I saw, but some reluctance to let the witty dialogue carry the burden was also evident. Beatrice's barbs draw friendly laughter from onlookers, which makes them seem like the heroine's partisans and turns Benedick more into the butt of her
jokes. That adds to an imbalance that Shakespeare put there, insofar as the lady is the stronger character. Why not let the barbed badinage stand on its own two feet?

Fortunately, Kern's portrayal is strongly defined, making Benedick's path toward romantic ardor believable despite the obstacles he has long placed in it, with Beatrice's eager help. Dandurand's asperity in her role is vivid and fierce, despite the way its verbal splendor is partially masked by stage laughter. The director moves Benedick and Beatrice plausibly with respect to each other; the ambivalence is there as they lock in visually even when they seem most at odds.

Among the host of male roles, most stalwart in their representation of authority and "man-splaining" are Leonato and Don Pedro, prince of Aragon, as played by Tom Beeler and Joshua Ramsey. Darby Kear crisply sounded the master note of villainy, an unrewarding two-dimensional role, as Don John, Pedro's resentful brother and engineer of the plot against Hero.

Exposing the plot through happenstance is the slapstick team of Dogberry, Messina's master constable, played to the hilt by Kelsey VanVoorst. Dogberry and his/her bumbling assistants in the town's night watch are not the most inspired representatives of Shakespeare's low comedy. I can understand why a broad interpretation is tempting, but dialing down the ridiculousness might serve this production better. Malapropisms, a chief ingredient of Dogberry's buffoonery, are tedious on the page but can feel jolly good on the stage, especially as satire on officious types puffing up their minor status. In this performance, however, the word play is buried under well-designed but excessive physical comedy. The irony of a bunch of incompetents uncovering a scheme their clueless betters are unable to detect is delicious enough.

Another aspect of cartoonish stylization makes more sense, however: scenes in which Benedick and Beatrice

Male quintet bonds over "Sigh No More," a Marty-Shakespeare instant hit.

separately overhear their friends proclaiming their rivals' secret devotion. Eavesdropping juicing the plot is a hoary staple of stage drama (including the tragic instances in "Hamlet" and "Othello") and it probably deserves the kind of elaborate send-up the director gives it here. Other blithe touches that worked well were the ensemble tango early on and the celebratory swing dancing at the end. And Brent E. Marty fashioned a cute pop tune for a guy vocal group to go with Shakespeare's "Sigh No More," led by Jonathan Doram as Balthazar.

These were sort of secondary delights that served the main thrust of the production well. It's just that underneath there seemed to be some anxiety about how little the audience would understand unless the stage business was unrestrained. Yet the play's very title is a warning to anyone tempted to question details of an entertainment as well put-together as this one.

[Photos by Zach Rosing]

Stature over statuettes: ISO guest conductor generates a mighty 'Symphonie fantastique,' rising soprano is illuminating

How far in advance a Classical Series program dominated by Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" was scheduled on Oscar weekend isn't known to me, but it was a masterstroke on the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra season.

The work carries a scenario of cinematic breadth and intensity. It's a landmark in the repertoire, an amazing composer debut in the symphony form, which Hector Berlioz shattered here and subsequently. In the same decade Berlioz departed this life, another norm-busting French composer entered it: Claude Debussy once said there was no excuse for the symphony after Beethoven's Ninth. At the tender age of 27, Berlioz anticipated that sentiment, embodying it uniquely in "Symphonie fantastique."

The imaginative transformation of a love affair suffused with idealism (and eventually to result in a disappointing marriage), the Fantastic Symphony set the stage for a host of "symphonic poems" and more formally conventional works that fulfilled the promise of romanticism throughout the 19th century. Narratively scrupulous pieces of minor importance, such as Dvorak's "Noonday Witch" and "The Water Goblin," are still worth hearing, and for even more literalism, sometimes overstuffed and vaunting, there's a host of viable Richard Strauss pieces.

Marc Albrecht makes his ISO conducting debut this weekend.

The Berlioz stands out not only for its pioneering status, but also because it seems to predict cinematic techniques, from panorama to close-up. It is both a character study and a fever-dream, and that's how it came across Friday night. It goes beyond the picturesque, and it overmasters any conceivable movie version. It subsumes the very idea of representation that movie scoring must serve.

It was last heard here nearly five years ago, in a dramatically highlighted interpretation led by Jun Märkl. Friday night's was under the baton of an ISO-debut guest conductor, Marc Albrecht. It had a somewhat more introspective cast and broadened its horizons almost hesitantly in approaching the tumult of the last two movements, "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath." "Scene in the Country," a slow movement that can seem finicky and tedious in uninspired hands, held the suspense that had been generated by the first two movements; much of the credit must go to Roger Roe's plaintive English-horn soloing.

Is there to be fulfillment of the lover's irrepressible passion? Well, as just about everyone knows, the upshot is conclusively the opposite – a hell of murderous rage and nightmarish retribution. It's movie music avant le lettre — movie music that doesn't need a movie, whose sound blends both visual and psychological components.

Berlioz himself might be the subject of a biopic, but it probably wouldn't be a good one. How many of them are? I can see an actor capable of rendering outward a clutch of internal torments, someone like Jude Law, who was so good as Thomas Wolfe in "Genius." It would have to be an actor capable of making the composer's outbursts believable, someone who could put genuine passion into such incidents as the time Berlioz, in the audience for a performance of "Der Freischutz," stood up and shouted: "You don't want two flutes there, you brutes. You want two piccolos. Two piccolos, do you hear? Oh, the brutes!"

Julia Bullock got inside the Rimbaud/Britten mystery.

Harold Schonberg relates the tale in his "Lives of the Great Composers," along with Berlioz's account of the difficulty of writing prose, which he did superbly, yet often staring at a blank sheet of paper that seemed to refuse his every effort to begin: "I felt simply overcome by despair. There was a guitar standing against the table. With one kick I smashed it in the center." Two pistols hanging on the chimney seemed to tempt him to a final rash act, Berlioz goes on. "At last, like a schoolboy who cannot do his homework, I tore my hair and wept with furious indignation." Berlioz was someone who wrote his life, while living it, in lurid colors. Fortunately, he was able to render some of that in music that has captured imaginations ever since.

Not being subject to an editor's deadlines or the rages of genius, I will press on here, wanting to recommend tonight's repeat of the program, especially for the performance of Julia Bullock in Benjamin Britten's song cycle, "Les Illuminations." This song cycle, an ingenious setting with string-orchestra accompaniment of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud, brought from the young American soprano an interpretation that seemed to make the weird imagery sensible and emotionally compelling. Just as he would in the Berlioz, especially with the strings, Albrecht showed a knack for drawing out significant phrasing. The accompaniment thus became as expressive as the vocal line, which Bullock projected with clarity and urgency.

The program opened with "Le Tombeau de Couperin," a masterpiece for small orchestra by Maurice Ravel. Its four cunningly shaped movements are notable for the sonorously noble and vivid wind writing (chiefly solo oboe, beautifully played by Jennifer Christen). It was as if Albrecht was able to present as a calling card his careful but lively ability to manage how instrumental choirs balance and offset one another in well-designed music. Ravel was a more polished craftsman than Berlioz, but the interpretive elan so useful in the later work was not out of place in rendering the special, red-carpet Fantastic Symphony that followed intermission.

Ensemble Music series: Polish string quartet works with Canadian pianist for sublime Dvorak

A string quartet of four young Polish musicians with a French name honors the traditional role of the Greek god Apollo as inspirer of the muses. Stravinsky's 1928 ballet, "Apollon Musagète," was later given a simpler title, "Apollo." Through his jealous championship of the lyre, the god has been celebrated as the divine force behind all music for strings.

Apollon Musagète reaches beyond the core repertoire, including work with Tori Amos.

The ensemble has extended the aura of that association, building an international reputation since its founding in Vienna in 2008. Wednesday evening the quartet played a program of Dvorak, Suk, and Schubert under the auspices of the Ensemble Music Society at the Glick Indiana History Center.

The high point involved a collaboration with Canadian pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin, who distinguished himself in the quartet's homeland as silver-prize winner  at the 2015 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. An expansive piece that remains at the summit of the repertoire for the combination of string quartet and piano, the Dvorak Quintet in A major, op. 81, enjoyed a luminous, supremely well-balanced performance Wednesday.

The Bohemian ethnic brand got startling prominence in the two middle movements — Dumka: Andante con moto and Furiant: Molto vivace. You rarely hear the slow-fast contrasts of Dumka episodes so sharply characterized in both mood and tempo as they were here. The rapid Furiant, in alternating meters, was consistently energized by accents and restless figuration. The pianist's sparkling tone matched the string players' glimmer and glow. And as the finale made clear — when I couldn't take my ears off the pianist, as it  were — Richard-Hamelin had an exquisitely balanced tone: great independence of finger meant that the proper weight was distributed among the notes of every chord. If Apollo was the inspirer of the muses. Richard-Hamelin seemed to be the inspirer of Apollon Musagète in this piece.

A Dvorak appetizer was offered by the quartet just before intermission. Two waltzes from Op. 54, originally piano pieces, were brightly played, given as much personality as their unpretentiousness deserved. Tempos had a plasticity well suited to the adaptable dance form the music celebrates. In the mostly headlong second waltz, the teasing push-pull of eastern European folk music, in which slowing cadences often set up fresh outbursts of energy, was charmingly rendered by the flawlessly coordinated foursome.

Josef Suk studied with Dvorak.

Bohemian roots of a much different sort nourished the program-opener, Josef Suk's Meditations on an Old Czech Hymn, "St. Wenceslas." The somber piece, with its carefully generated climax, emphasized Apollo Musagète's unanimity of phrasing and its balanced, eloquent yet restrained tone worthy of a fine choir.

There remained an oblique salute to the city of the quartet's origin: Vienna, as Apollon Musagète exhibited the burgeoning genius of Franz Schubert in his first string quartet (in G minor/B-flat major, D. 18). The work of a teenager — a prolific native son and, as it turned out, one without much of a life span to spare — it opened in an atmosphere that seemed a foreshadowing of the Suk piece. The first movement quickly brightens, however, and the quartet exhibited its well-considered distribution of melodic and ornamental features. In the second movement, first violinist Pawel Zalejski's serene, muted statement of the melody floated in unruffled grandeur.

The group's other members, speaking musically with a common mind here and elsewhere, are Bartosz Zachlod, second violin; Piotr Szumiel, viola, and Piotr Skweres, cello. The three musicians whose instruments can be played standing did so, and the advantage was palpable. They wore identical purple plaid suits; there was considerable discussion during intermission about why the cellist was not similarly dressed. It turns out that Skweres' luggage did not arrive with the others'.

Indianapolis Quartet offers Beethoven, Debussy, and a sneak preview of a Felice recording

A shrewdly assembled program, combined with a wholly committed performance of it, made for a satisfying outing by the Indianapolis Quartet as it moves into the new decade.

Butler University  presented the concert in its Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall Tuesday evening. To start with, honor was paid to Ludwig van Beethoven in his quarter-millennial year — an obligation hardly any classical musician or organization will dare overlook in 2020.

By now, this ensemble, formed at the University of Indianapolis in  2016, has settled into a high level of internal rapport; confidence at both the macro and the micro levels tends to result. The players are violinists Zachary Depue and Joana Genova, violist Michael Strauss, and cellist Austin Huntington. To choose No. 5 (A major) of Beethoven's Opus 18 placed the concert on an inviting plane, because the work unfolds in an uncomplicated manner, sufficiently inventive — especially in the Andante cantabile movement, a theme-and-variations — while retaining unity of effect and style.

The acoustics at Eidson-Duckwall are quite acute, which requires conscientious attention to softer dynamic levels to keep them from buttonholing the audience. In Beethoven, gentle phrases are often inflected with sudden accents (sforzandos), such as those that make the Trio of the minuet stand out, as though a graceful but slightly lead-footed dancer had taken the floor. The Indianapolis Quartet deserves credit for putting the work's milder phrases into just enough prominence, as in the closing measures of the last movement, avoiding the way the hall consistently invites excessive energy.

The Indianapolis Quartet continues to make its mark on the local scene.

The straightforward charm of the A major quartet and its rootedness in the classical style offered a piquant comparison with Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, which occupied the concert's second half. Also relatively early in its composer's output, the Frenchman's sole exercise in the genre has formal links to the tradition that Beethoven advanced so thoroughly in his sixteen string quartets.

Debussy's provocative writing on music includes a fair amount of respect for Beethoven, particularly when it comes to the value of upsetting musical apple carts. In an area where he was prolific, he felt competitive with the German master, dismissing the latter's keyboard music as "badly written for the piano." But Debussy's string quartet looks forward to the peculiar strain of modernism that he blazed trails toward, and he never felt called upon to return to it as he pitched more than a few pommes himself.

There was much that was admirable about the Indianapolis Quartet's performance, but my take on almost all of Debussy is that its passion is always slightly cool, its dissonances more a matter of atmosphere and not quite so crunchy and rhetorically significant as in the Austro-German tradition.

Distancing himself from romanticism seems to me to have been a constant preoccupation of Debussy, and at times Tuesday's performance had a little too much "bite" in the articulation and prioritized vigor over nuance. There was a light touch in the second movement that was thoroughly idiomatic, and the recitative-like passages in the third movement were quite beguiling, particularly from the viola. The surges and relaxations of tempo in the finale were astutely managed. All in all, it was an exciting performance whose stresses are certainly signaled in the score, yet I inferred an attempt by the musicians to set the Debussy up as a big, emotionally loaded statement in contrast to the Beethoven. It was a justifiable choice especially from a programming standpoint — just not a totally convincing one interpretively.

Mitigating the contrast was a new piece by Butler composer Frank Felice, a setting of Psalm 16 for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, "Preserve Me, O God."  The mood swings of the biblical psalms have long been a welcome playground for composers. Felice adeptly covers Psalm 16's changes of direction from simple piety to rage against false gods and their followers, then back to celebration of the inheritance of true faith and its blessings. Mitzi Westra, the composer's wife and a favorite local singer for many concertgoers, gave a stirring account of the text, lovingly shaped and generously supported by the string quartet. The work will be featured among others on a forthcoming recording of Felice chamber music featuring strings on Enharmonic Records.

'Can You Imagine?' is John Bailey's tribute to modern trumpet pioneer Dizzy Gillespie

John Bailey has his band musically canvassing for DG.

The half-serious run that Dizzy Gillespie made for the U.S. presidency many decades ago gets a memorial tribute as John Bailey tosses the Dizzy beret into the 2020 ring with "Can You Imagine?" (Freedom Road Records).

The rhetorical question in the title asks the listener to fantasize about the the affable bebop pioneer in the Oval Office. Bailey, a veteran trumpeter with a host of eminent collaborations in his c.v., composed the centerpiece tribute, "President Gillespie Suite."

Bailey is outstanding  both muted in the first section, "The Humanitarian Candidate," and with the open horn he turns to later. Trombonist Earl McIntyre, employing the plunger mute, sits in during the second movement, "Road to the Blues House," which is typical of the set's nifty arrangements and the way they always give extra polish to the solos.

The band, with a rock-solid rhythm section of Eddie Gomez, piano; Mike Karn, bass, and Victor Lewis, drums, manages tempo shifts fluently, giving a special freshness to Lewis' "The Touch of Her Vibe." Gomez, never excessively decorative,  takes a pretty solo on "Ballad from Oro," a piece by Chico O'Farrill, one of the Latin-jazz masters whom Bailey honors. Alto flutist Janet Axelrod lends an air of twilight mystery to another Latin ballad, the mellow "Valsa Rancho."

Of the other members of the "Can You Imagine?" core group, saxophonist Stacy Dillard contributes a steady ensemble voice in the lively set-opener, "Pebbles in the Pocket," and several solos elsewhere. The adept front line is filled out by trombonist Stafford Hunter.

The set ends imaginatively with a familiar tune that also serves the album's purpose, "People," with Bailey settling fruitfully into the trumpet's low register, with only the adaptable Gomez as duo partner. If this release on Bailey's own label has to be thought of in a political context, keep in mind that "Can You Imagine?" doesn't force an agenda on anyone beyond respect for the human community.

At Clowes, Louisville Ballet offers program of high contrast, high achievement

As part of the JCA Signature Series, in which visiting artists' educational side is combined with public performance,  Butler University Friday night welcomed the Louisville Ballet to Clowes Hall for a program of three of the company's works.

The opening piece, "Models," stood out for me, though each of its companions had distinctive charms.

Freedom or other-directed mastery?: A scene from "Models"

Somewhat put off by Cornelius' music though I was, Tim Harbour's choreography built upon its variety of hard-driving electronic sounds to achieve a perfect, yet often surprising, blend of how it all looked and how the dancers moved. Alexandra Ludwig's costume designs offered a unisex version, with matching scarfs and caps, of the Australian Boy Scout uniforms the choreographer recalled from his youth.

The closely measured duet in "Models."

Daniel Perez's lighting sometimes "grayed out" forms and colors of the uniforms subtle tints, and at other times made them keenly sculptural. Above the stage were three abstract shapes designed by Matt Weir. They hovered, sheltered, and perhaps exerted control over the figures, particularly in ensemble. That last quality was a matter of suggestion, prompted by Harbour's program note, indicating the dancers' "maneuvers being controlled like puppets, as though from an external force."

But most striking is that such an interpretation is required to sit among images of freedom and such individualism as the romantic love expressed in a central, slow duet. For the most part, however, "Models" presented ensembles, from eight to more than twice that number. Sometimes regimentation overtook them, quasi-martial drills. At other times, the repetitive movements seemed to come from the assembly line. Angular postures, with arms jerked upward, conveyed the feeling of a marionette show.

There was more than a hint that such close-order drill and mechanized movement were being tested and resisted, but also celebrated as a bonding device. "Models" had something to be enthralled by at every moment. At the end, the music stopped and just before the curtain descended, we saw two groups of  hunched-over figures dashing from one side of the stage to the other — a neat image with which to represent the ambivalence of people treated like dolls, dolls treated like people.

The well-ordered training of the company was highlighted in the finale, Stanton Welch's "Velocity," in which classic ballet techniques are combined and repurposed, sometimes with parodic intent. There was textbook presentation  of positions and admirably controlled delineation of what is often presented with a *narrative scenario in the classic ballets. In "Velocity," though, we see a nicely linked abstract embodiment of elements with modernistic touches. Arms may suddenly vary from a graceful carriage to a wrenched position, palms up, elbows in, with the head thrown back. A tutu-clad dancer executes leg beats while being carried horizontally. The building blocks of dance, from illusions of weightlessness to grounded athleticism, are smoothly juxtaposed. Welch set it all to a couple of movements from the synesthetic American composer Michael Torke; the music comes out of Stravinsky and Philip Glass, with lavish orchestration suggesting Richard Strauss — quite suitable in its eclecticism to what "Velocity" seems to be about.

In the middle was Andrea Schermoly's "at High," a poignant piece of lamentation and adjustment drawing heavily on the spirit of its music, the lengthy "Ruhevoll (Poco adagio)" from Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in G major. A boyish central figure enters a confusing scene of people, well suited to one another but leaving him to make his own way. One physically statuesque male dancer helps him, seeming a sort of Virgilian guide to the young man's Dante. This may be importing too much to Schermoly's scenario, but then there emerges a figure, finely mediating between the two men and perhaps representing an ideal, a Beatrice. A plain white structure, a kind of mesa, is at one side of the stage to suggest a position from which the central figures get a kind of overview before they join the group. This is not Dante's more well-known view of a horrifying Inferno, but rather (echoing the meaning of the Mahler symphony) a glimpse of an inviting Paradiso. The earnestness, steady pathos, and absence of bizarre touches in this work made it a fitting companion between "Models" and "Velocity."