Jay Harvey Upstage

Perhaps falling in love with the Three Tenors as a toddler inclined Kenny Broberg toward fascination with immediate appeal through music. It may have planted the seed for the kind of direct communication that won him the Christel DeHaan Fellowship of the 2021 American Pianists Awards Sunday afternoon. Kenny Broberg displayed direct insights on way to Fellowship. The biographical tidbit was part of a series of video sketches and on-site remarks by co-hosts Sylvia McNair and Terrance McKnight about the five finalists in the American Pianists Association' s concentrated classical competition. An unusually large audience (in immediately post-pandemic terms) at Indiana Landmarks Center waited in suspense for the jury's decision along with, thanks to live-streaming, a worldwide audience of indeterminate size. Before the big announcement, itself preceded by speeches of thanks and congratulation, the finalists played brief solo recitals that should count as the Awards' performance...

The chamber-music and concerto phases of the 2021 American Pianists Awards have necessarily been squeezed into one concert each, meaning that much of the repertoire was trimmed down to a movement or two per pianist. The second concert presented the finalists working with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gerard Schwarz ; on Friday each had been joined by the excellent Dover String Quartet at the Indiana History Center. The competitive aspect of the quadrennial classical division (every other two years is devoted to jazz) of these well-heeled contests has thus been given a focus with pluses and minuses attached. A concert artist, especially in collaboration, develops a concept of a chosen piece that brings out his or her personality across the spectrum of a composer's unified creation. Nonetheless, a movement of significant length is also a unit of creative and interpretive achievement, and listeners (including the jury) don't have to divide their impress...

The geometry of living too close: Sarah Taylor's "feast."  In "Acts of Gratitude," seven members of Dance Kaleidoscope take turns introducing new dances created around their grateful feelings. It will remain online through June 30. The challenges of the probably waning pandemic, including restraints on working together for over a year, have to be put in the context of rehearsing in the company's new home and readying programs for a return to in-person performances. Thus, joy and pain are inevitable companions in the process, as they have been for most people in our collective sojourn through maximum uncertainty. The show illuminates a wide swath of personal responses, each set upon a chosen number of colleagues. Not surprisingly, the responses are heavy in terms of seriousness. The choreographers and their peer group have been particularly challenged, because young people's years of greatest energy and productivity have had a time-out imposed on them. Th...

Once I found a home radio with truer fidelity, I was able to engage with APA finalist Kenny Broberg 's full artistry as the current competition's series of five solo recitals came to an end. It was my debut catching up to the series in Tuesday evening radio programming. Kenny Broberg started with Beethoven, ended with Scriabin. WFYI-FM's hourlong broadcasts of the five recitals can be a bit disconcerting, I found out, in the tiny separation they permit between selections. Artistic director and CEO Joel Harrison announces the program at the start; then listeners must be alert to separate each piece from its neighbor. The ear can do this before the mind does. When the commissioned work, Laura Kaminsky's "Alluvion," stepped aggressively on the heels of a Gabriel Fauré barcarole, I was startled. Otherwise, the difficulty was purely local for me: I couldn't get a sense of Broberg's qualities during the first piece, Beethoven's Sonata in A-flat, op. 110...

Mark Masters displays comfortable artistry. An arranger with fresh ears for classic jazz and Great American Songbook sounds, Mark Masters here takes on a landmark Duke Ellington band of 80 years ago. The ensemble is often labeled the Webster-Blanton band, and Masters' aim was to see if 21st-century magic could be wrung from some of the ensemble's most famous tunes with new personnel and different settings.  The Mark Masters Ensemble has already displayed the bandleader's arranging skills with CDs devoted to new treatments of Alec Wilder's songs, Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," and the music of trumpeter Clifford Brown, like Blanton a rising star cut off in his prime. "Masters and Baron Meet Blanton & Webster" is the mouthfilling title of the new disc ( Capri Records Ltd. ), and the second name refers to plunger-trombone master Art Baron, an Ellington alumnus. He lends some authentic solo flavor to the arrangements; another stalwart whose name d...

 The adept Lincoln Trio — violinist Desiree Ruhstrat, cellist David Cunliffe, pianist Marta Aznavoorian —    has borrowed the muscular rhetoric of Carl Sandburg's poetry in titling its new Cedille release "Music from the City of Big Shoulders." The Lincoln Trio adds to its attractive discography. The disc comprises two big-shouldered works by 20th-century composers who were born or made their names in Chicago: Ernst Bacon (Trio No. 2) and Leo Sowerby (Trio [1953]). Both men achieved wide-ranging musical careers, each with a Pulitzer Prize composition to his credit. The Bacon recording is a world premiere. The Sowerby I know from a recording made on the New World label decades ago; there it is paired with a piece for the same instrumentation by the teenage composer. The earlier piece displays a tendency to ride hard on his materials, a doggedness that persists in the piece on the new recording. Fortunately, the material is more distinguished in the 1953 piece. But the ado...

Chick Corea (1941-2021) In a recent online gathering of active jazz stars, Patrice Rushen identified Chick Corea's signal contribution to the music as a balance of precision and spontaneity. Preston Williams welcomed Rushen and a range of other luminaries to " Jazz Talk" shortly after Corea's death in February. As Rushen indicated, the honoree's  compositions have an open-ended feeling enfolded in well-focused structures.  It's true that the open-endedness sometimes took over, lending Corea's vast output an encyclopedic, come-one-come-all quality. But that was the result of his ceaseless curiosity and receptiveness, which drew from Williams' Zoom-assembled panel unanimous praise. That means, I would guess, that there are very few Corea "completists" — fans who find everything he did to their taste. As the great New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett once noted in introducing his jaundiced view of a Corea set in a 1981 festival: "Chick Corea...

 It has been quite moving to hear and see the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in its home once again, particularly so Friday in the prominence its concert gave to two of its musicians to get the public exposure they deserve. Their identification as key parts of the ISO's artistic mission has been interrupted by the pandemic's "Babylonian Captivity" of the orchestra — in which its vitality away from its real base, the Hilbert Circle Theatre, also entailed the inability to exercise its artistry as an ensemble and host of usually excellent guest artists. I speak particularly of associate, now resident, conductor Jacob Joyce and concertmaster Kevin Lin. Joyce was on the podium for a program nearly up to the exposure the orchestra enjoyed, concert after concert, before March 2020.  The lack of an intermission, part of the COVID-19 restrictions on public indoor events, has forced some shrinkage. Yet this weekend's two concerts, which wrap up the core 2020-21 season, c...

Dominic Cheli put together a captivating recital.  Sunday afternoon in the American Pianists Association' s Classical Awards recital series, a cleverly designed program helped Dominic Cheli showcase his enormous facility and power without overemphasizing them. Daring to put other modern pieces alongside the competition piece, Laura Kaminsky's "Alluvion," was one striking decision. In his evidently large-scale investment in music by Leslie Adams and Carl Vine, Cheli displayed his gift for finding the distinctiveness of lesser-known works.  Along the way he placed the first of Alexander Scriabin's "Two Poems," providing an enchanting contrast to the galvanic splendor of Vine's Sonata No. 1. About 16 minutes long in this performance, the one-movement sonata moved from a tolling-bells episode into a whirlwind toccata, folded in a subdued respite, then moved back into complex virtuosity that left its mark on an ensuing slow melody near the end. No regist...

Peter Oundjian, ISO guest conductor With pandemic-related travel restrictions keeping Krzysztof Urbanski, the I ndianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's outgoing music director, from putting a cap on his ten-year tenure, Peter Oundjian has stepped in once again. In two appearances at Hilbert Circle Theatre this weekend (the second one starts at 5:30 p.m. today), Oundjian enjoys the onstage company of returning concerto favorite Garrick Ohlsson as soloist in Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor. Heard in the ISO program's debut Friday night, Oundjian confirmed the directness and vitality of his conducting, not only in his sensitive partnership with Ohlsson but in the intermissionless concert's concluding work,  Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor. An acknowledged super-interpreter of Chopin's music ever since he won the Polish competition named for Once again, Garrick Ohlsson shines in Chopin. the composer in 1970, Ohlsson offered a mellow, luminous account of ...

Making an individual impression on listeners can't guarantee thorough satisfaction, but what Luke Hsu showed in the 2018 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis had the merit of not sinking into a competition-friendly style that wouldn't allow him to stand out. His technical aplomb was linked to a surging expressiveness that compelled notice and won for him the contest's bronze medal. 2018 bronze medalist Luke Hsu put together a winning program. What I remember from how he played there, as well as from a return recital of medalists in 2019 , seems to have been slightly chastened and given more focus, to judge from the Laureate Series recital Hsu presented Thursday evening at Indiana Landmark s, with  Chih-Yi Chen at the piano.  Perhaps the enforced idleness of the pandemic has lent him perspective without neutralizing his personal engagement with the repertoire. And the elimination of "contest nerves" presumably has helped in lending mellowness and plasti...

  Making a step forward to help the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra solidify its artistic side for the 2021-22 season, associate conductor Jacob Joyce takes on the title of resident conductor. Details on the new season were announced today, and are accessible by linking to  the orchestra's website. (As of June 3, he was tapped to conduct two ISO concerts next week that were to have been under the baton of Krzysztof Urbanski, the departing music director. The ISO announced that travel restrictions related to the pandemic forced Urbanski to cancel his farewell appearances in Hilbert Circle Theatre.) Jacob Joyce: new ISO resident conductor A representative of the under-30 generation now making its mark in classical music, Joyce has been been on the conducting staff since 2018. He told me that his new position essentially continues the duties of the job he was hired for three years ago. The difference is that the need for continuity needed to be shored up in th...