Jay Harvey Upstage

You open your program for Phoenix Theatre 's "Bakersfield Mist," and on facing pages are a statement from the playwright, Stephen Sachs, and opposite it the conventional page of complete credits, production history, and setting information. Two different views of a modernist painting will be set against each other by drastically dissimilar characters, you learn, while awaiting the production's debut. When you see one of the credits is "fight choreographer" (Scott Russell), you are justified in concluding there is more than aesthetics at stake in the uninterrupted span of time ahead. Authenticity, on the other hand, is worth fighting over. And that's the terrain on which a pitched battle will ensue. Maude (Jolene Mentink Moffat) puts her case to Lionel (Joshua Coomer). Authenticity is what Maude Gutman, an ex-bartender in a trailer home under California desert sun, and Lionel Percy, a New York art expert whose help she solicits in assessing a painting she...

Most of the music on "Here With You" occupies such a high place in the estimation of clarinet players that they use it to refute joking expressions of pity from violinists and pianists about their repertoire. They have the Opus 120 Brahms sonatas, after all. McGill is principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic. Anthony McGill chuckles about it in a podcast interview with James Ginsburg, founder and director of Cedille Records, which this month issued "Here With You,"  a recital disc the clarinetist performs with pianist Gloria Chien .  He's referring to the two late sonatas for clarinet and piano by Johannes Brahms. In length, they occupy two-thirds of the CD, which is completed by Carl Maria von Weber's "Grand Duo Concertant" and Jessie Montgomery's "Peace." The partnership is so solid and inspiring that the CD title is justified by the McGill-Chien bond itself, as well as its indication of the value of getting together as ...

Jazz drumming ranges from a service position in the music to a magnetic force generating everything from Jared Schonig earns a living mainly on Broadway. creation to execution. In "Two Takes" ( Anzic Records ), Jared Schonig spreads the more activist role widely by presenting original compositions in two forms: big band and quintet. Each has its own CD covering the same material set in a different order. The small group honors the combo tradition in the way it maximizes solo space. Yet Schonig's choice of sidemen doesn't parade its individuality as much as the musicians honor the new material; as an ensemble, the quintet works well. Driven by the creator/boss, they are Marquis Hill, trumpet; Luis Perdomo, piano and Rhodes electric piano; Godwin Louis, alto saxophone, and Matt Clohesy, bass.  To emphasize the solo contributions, Schonig inserts three solo drum interludes within the program of his nine compositions, and starts things off with a brief introduction to the...

 "Celebrating Mother Earth" is an old-fashioned title for a program very much focused on the present. Reinaldo Moya, commissioned composer The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra put together a couple of modern pieces to represent attitudes toward the nature that we are called to be familiar with, and anchored the unfamiliar in the familiar with a classic covering a basic fact of the natural world: seasonal change. It was "The Four Seasons," the durable set of violin concertos by the Italian baroque master Antonio Vivaldi. Saturday night's concert at Butler University's Schrott Center opened with a commissioned work, "Dark Earth: Anthropogenic Amazon," by Reinaldo Moya , a 36-year-old native of Venezuela, US-trained as a composer and now living in Minnesota. It's a shame the composer's program notes were not in the printed program; nor was there any talk about the work from the stage. You can read about the piece's significance and the proc...

Sean Chen showed nuance and insight.  Many listeners to classical music, not all of them unsophisticated, find themselves conjuring visual images not only as accompaniment to what they hear, but also as ways to invest what might otherwise remain abstract with concrete meaning. When a composer explicitly writes two sets of pieces called "Images" (which works equally well as French or English), the permission to think visually seems foreordained, even required. Of course, the drawback is that there's no way of controlling that.  And what Debussy said about "Images," which Sean Chen played Friday night in recital at the Palladium , indicates some freedom in allowing his special language of harmonies and phrases to go beyond the image suggested by each title. Why does "Reflets dans l'eau" (Reflections on the water) ever get tumultuous, for instance? Debussy must have felt impelled to go with his musical ideas and to some extent leave the reflectivene...

Terence Blanchard in full cry in return to the Kitchen To honor jazz elder statesman Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard turns to his long-running E-Collective band and, more recently, the Turtle Island String Quartet on a tour that came to the Jazz Kitchen Tuesday night. As ever, Blanchard is relaxed and inviting in his commentary from the stage. His music also seemed to connect with most of the capacity audience in the first set of a two-night stand at the club. In his chat, he showed ample respect to his sidemen and veneration for Shorter, the veteran saxophonist-composer who is actively nearing 90. Credit to Blanchard for building on his local history of audience rapport, though it can't possibly go back as far as he said: the trumpeter couldn't have been with Art Blakey when he first played the Kitchen, which has been in business since 1994; the drummer died in 1990. Blanchard is fresh enough creatively that "Absence," the recording project that he's now repres...

Kenny Phelps: Symbol (of Indianapolis jazz) with cymbal  As much as I've heard Kenny Phelps play drums around town since starting this blog eight-and-a-half years ago, I was amazed to discover after typing his name into my search window that 40 articles came up. Nearly all of them were reviews of bands in which he was the drummer of choice. If I'd been even more active, and if this were exclusively a jazz blog, I'm sure the count would be higher. Of course, before May 2013, there were countless times when his contributions to Indianapolis jazz appeared under my byline in the Indianapolis Star. So I was just as steeped in Phelps' music as many others who gathered at Madam C.J. Walker Theater Friday night to appreciate his response to a commission from the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation in a program called "Kenny Phelps presents...The Artisan." His outreach to younger players through his "Beyond the Stage" program and leadership of the Owl Music Group  w...

The task of playwrights to get something dramatic started and finished in under ten minutes must be to have audiences quickly focused on characters and a situation with a minimum of exposition. Back stories must be cryptic. Very little context-setting dialogue can be afforded. What can be put across that won't seem like merely an idea for a play, rather than an actual play, complete in itself? 'Two Yards of Satan': Devil is in seamstress' details. The form seems more limiting than the short story, because you need actors to mediate concisely between words on the page and stage presentation. Seven of this year's submissions to the 10-Minute Play Festival debuted on Indy Fringe's Basile stage Thursday night, and they met the shrunk genre's difficulties with a range of ambition and success. They have different directors and emerge from different creative niches. The annual festival is coordinated by Megan Ann Jacobs, who wrote one of the seven plays: "Karm...

The fight for women's suffrage in the United States stretched out over decades, so it was fitting, if inconvenient, for there to have been a one-year delay in Ensemble Music Society 's carefully planned centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment. The right to vote for women, constitutionally guaranteed in 1920, had certifiable, if oblique, justification in the achievements of 19th-century American women in many fields. Among them was the prolific Amy Beach (1867-1944).  Long known as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach in deference to her husband, she had established a prodigious reputation in her youth as composer and pianist. A tireless advocate for publication and performance of her music in a male-dominated culture, she "leaned in" long before Sheryl Sandberg came up with the female self-help slogan . Beach's Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, op. 67, was the summit of Wednesday evening's thematic program, titled "19th Amendment Centennial Plus One," at the Indiana...

Putting the chief titan of world theater onstage as a character is nervy in itself. And it's a key to Indy Bard Fest 's daring in ending its current season with "Elizabeth Rex," in which the festival's namesake figure interacts with the title character, Queen Elizabeth I. The need of either Shakespeare or the Virgin Queen to carry all the dramatic weight themselves is cleverly Holly Hathaway Thompson in "Elizabeth Rex." elided by Timothy Findley in making a fictional figure, actor Ned Lowenscroft, the chief provocateur of the action.  He is a principal actor in the Lord Chamberlain's troupe, members of which are housed temporarily in a royal barn because of a curfew imposed on the nation the night before the 1601 execution of an accused traitor, the Earl of Essex.  After a command performance of "Much Ado About Nothing," the barn-bound actors, the playwright, and their wardrobe mistress receive a surprise visit from the Queen, conflicted ab...

While his Hammond B-3 awaited at center stage, Joey DeFrancesco began the first of two sets Saturday Joey DeFrancesco in a formal pose night at the Jazz Kitchen with forays into his other instruments: trumpet and tenor saxophone. Touring behind a new recording simply titled "More Music," the Philadelphia musician returned to the Kitchen for the first time since Feb. 29, 2020, he recalled for the audience as the set got under way. That was on the brink of everybody's forced vacation.  That idled DeFrancesco and so many others for over a year, during which time he honed his chops on those two wind instruments and wrote the pieces for the new CD, many of which he and his trio brought out here. His current tour has him assisted by Lucas Brown, a guitarist-keyboardist, and Anwar Marshall, drums. Starting with trumpet, both muted and open, which he's played professionally since his teens (he's now 50),  DeFrancesco and his trio set sail with a piece called "Free,...

 A famous English poem opens with this outburst: "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" A bird is being addressed, though the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, has given himself license to say it isn't. The second line of "To a Skylark" is explicit about that. And there isn't much blithe spirit, feathered or otherwise, to hail in the English music the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra i s featuring this weekend. That's another contradiction, this time to an old stereotype, the pastoral vision of "Merrie England." As guest conductor Carlos Kalmar pointed out from the podium Friday, a persistent image of measured calm and lofty elegance about things English is readily subject to contradiction.  English history alone is tumultuous enough to pose a challenge to such views. And so it turned out that the only blithe spirit on display in the first of two "Greetings from England" concerts was the animated Recitative and Scherzo, the Fritz Kreisler encore pla...

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), as visionary a composer as the history of Western music affords, provides the generative power for the major piece on Indianapolis Ballet' s season-opening program, "New Works." The program runs through Sunday. A selection of the Russian composer's solo piano pieces for ballet thus lends a proper highlighting of founder-director Victoria Lyras' vision of her increasingly accomplished and stable company. It's been newly underwritten with sponsors throughout its personnel, though it's still seeking a regular performance home downtown. "Scriabin Suite": Making shallow space seem large enough. "Scriabin Suite" cheats a little bit on the implication of "new works," however, since the work has been previously performed, as Lyras told the opening night audience at the District Theatre Thursday. But she regards setting such a piece on different dancers as qualification to be called new. And that may ju...

Rich Cohen: saxophonic mass and energy from a former physics teacher "Copacetic" is one of those faux-fancy words that entered the language about the start of the Jazz Age (1919). Like jazz itself, its origin is unknown (says the dictionary), and its meaning ("very satisfactory") can also apply to countless jazz performances by adept practitioners of the music.  It was thus quite fitting that a piece of that title concluded a long Sunday night set by the Cohen-Rutkowski Project at the Jazz Kitchen. Like all of this band's book, it was composed by Chris Rutkowski, the pianist who co-leads the band with saxophonist Rich Cohen. And the peppy finale also got a little extra heat as one guest star (tenor saxophonist Rob Dixon) was joined by another (trombonist Freddie Mendoza) to make for a formidable front line. Opening with an infectious riff and settling into a Crescent City groove, "Copacetic" featured ripe solos by the two guests. It provided roomy acc...