Jay Harvey Upstage

At a crucial point in Charles Smith 's new play, which opened Friday night in an Indiana Repertory Theatre world-premiere production, a distant view of Thomas Jefferson's plantation home of Monticello dissolves in a wash of cloudy atmosphere. Well designed at every turn, "The Reclamation of Madison Hemings" is notable in part for the projections design of Mike Tutaj. In what amounts to what the Greeks called the perpeteia, a turning point in the circumstances of the title character, Monticello vanishes. For a time, a grayish-brown celestial stew pervades the backdrop, suggesting a J.M.W. Turner painting and symbolizing the obscurity into which Madison's quest to reclaim his identity has fallen. At Monticello Israel and Madison consider their paths forward. The downstage action involves Hemings shooting a blind, starving mule whose braying has annoyed him and the more crucial collapse of an axle on the wagon onto which Thomas Jefferson's aging son has loaded it...

  Cover art is nearly as enthralling as the music. Though the repertoire on this disc (Sheva Productions) might seem to occupy a small niche, there is an astonishing range of style and language (musical and verbal alike) over which Sahoko Sato Timpone and Kenneth Merrill show a ready command in "Songs of Japonisme." After Japan opened to the West in the mid-19th century, there was plenty of mutual regard between Japanese and European/American cultures before the disruptions and hostility of World War II. Japanese poetry was often translated, and its visual arts effected a strong influence on modernism that extended to decor and fashion as well. The mezzo-soprano and pianist recorded this imaginative collection of songs in 2018 at Purchase (N.Y.) College. The opening work includes the only other performer besides the duo recitalists: clarinetist Andy Biskin. Yoritsune Matsudaira's song "Asakusa Overture" reflects the degree to which there was some pre-war Japane...

 There's no need to subscribe to a blanket assertion that "music is a universal language" to concede that With a flourish, Sphinx Virtuosi conclude a piece. there is always more work to be done in expanding its realm. In classical music, up to now, the most conspicuous representation of non-white composers and performers  has stemmed from east Asia, particularly Japan, Korea, and China (including Taiwan).  The Sphinx organization , founded in Detroit in 1997, has made strides toward making the aptitude and interest of black and Hispanic musicians more evident and available to the public. That was the import of Sphinx Virtuosi' s appearance Saturday night at the Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel. The 17 members of the string ensemble now on tour seemed to revel in the acoustics of the Palladium. That affinity was noted by Tommy Mesa, the principal cellist, in remarks to the rapt audience before he played Andrea Casarrubios' "Seven" to open the conc...

Buechner confirming score affinity. Way back in 1981, in the infancy of the American Pianists Association, then based in New York City and called the Beethoven Foundation, three pianists shared the top prize. One of them then had the identity of David Buechner.  But in a process she has since described and talked about in detail, Sara Davis Buechner started and completed a transition. As a transgender woman, Buechner has built a substantial teaching and performing career. On Sunday afternoon, in an engagement former APA artistic director Joel Harrison described as long overdue, Buechner played a recital that confirmed the early promise of her artistry, this time under the auspices of the APA in its longtime hometown, Indianapolis.  A large crowd assembled at the Glick Indiana History Center to express its enthusiasm at what the recitalist had to offer. It was an unusual program leaning toward the lighter side. In its diversity of technical and expressive demands, the music w...

This weekend Jun Märkl returns to the Hilbert Circle Theatre podium as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra' s artistic advisor with an appropriate program, given his German-Japanese heritage: "Greetings from Japan" continues the "postcard" theme of many Classical Series concerts in 2021-22. A favorite of the opera repertoire is being marketed as the program's chief attraction. Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," represented here by its third act, with vocal soloists from Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music , has lately had a swirl of controversy connected to its patronizing  (some would say racist) attitudes toward the Orient, as well as to questions of proper casting.  Jun Märkl: Three aspects of Japan's musical presence. "Butterfly" makes me squeamish because of its long signaling of the title character's victimhood; hearing or even thinking about this opera repeatedly drains my sympathy for Cio-Cio-San. The man who be...

Steve Allee and Chris Parker backed up Frank Glover in free jazz.  While I awaited the start of a set of free jazz at the Jazz Kitchen by clarinetist Frank Glover, accompanied by Steve Allee at the piano and Chris Parker at the drums, news popped into my iPhone of the death on Feb. 8  of Ron Miles. Born in Indianapolis, Miles was a cornetist/trumpeter long active in Denver, where he often partnered in small groups with tenor saxophonist Fred Hess, who predeceased him in 2018. Miles and Hess were provincial exemplars of regional small-group acoustic jazz with free-jazz influences. I knew their music only through several recordings made in this century's first decade. The influence of jazz without set tunes and patterns, and absent steady tempos, chord progressions and bar lines, extends to musicians (like this Denver coterie) who feel that the expanded horizons of free jazz are invitations to come up with unconventional frameworks for improvised music. Frameworks of some kind...

  Danish trio: Jens Elvekjaer, Soo-Kyung Hong, Soo-Jin Hong Never strangers to living under the thumb of autocratic rule, Russians managed to absorb enough influence from Western arts to evolve styles of their own that have contributed to the European mainstream.  Their composers were able to look inward without becoming hermetic. The foot in the door was the French language, which was historically preferred at court and among the upper class. In music, Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) paved the way. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) remains the prime example of cagey resistance, with a soupcon of accommodation, to the narrowing influence of repressive aesthetics in modern Russian music. A compact foreground for the conflicted modernism that bore prolific fruit in his compositions was the coming of age that classical music in Russia enjoyed in the late 19th century. Its crowning achievement was Tchaikovsky's. Among the lesser lights in the Romantic flowering of Russian music was Ant...

My recent acquaintance with the work of Dominique Morisseau took on seminar status with the opening night Friday of her "Mud Row" at Fonseca Theatre . Another of her plays, "Skeleton Crew," is halfway through its run at Phoenix Theatre in a Summit Performance Indianapolis production.  For a short time, then, local theater-lovers get a chance to compare two Morisseau plays and two ways of doing them. I got the uneasy feeling while thinking about the excellent "Skeleton Crew" that Morisseau may have a tendency to overload her characters, shining lights on racism through them. Directorial control is essential in maintaining forward momentum and making sure so much information out of the characters' mouths feels essential in portraying talkative people rather than creative self-indulgence or padding. "Skeleton Crew" was subject to such control, fortunately.  My second "seminar" session was more revealing about how thoroughly Morisseau a...

  Strength and precision: Emily Dyson aloft in "iconoGlass." "Edge of Innovation" as a title readies Dance Kaleidoscope audiences for the two new works that make up the first half of its current program at Indiana Repertory Theatre . But the crown jewel in the show, which runs through Sunday, is a 1998 David Hochoy piece I've now written about three times. "iconoGlass" hasn't lost its stunning quality for me. It is so vivid a realization of a choreographed response to the music of Philip Glass that it tempts me to think there is no better way to listen to Glass than when it's accompanied by DK dancers presenting Hochoy's choreography. I don't remember the 1998 premiere, but have been thrilled by seeing the work in 2013 and 2015. In intermission remarks Thursday evening, artistic director Hochoy admitted that a creative spur with "iconoGlass" was to make a piece that would push his dancers to their limits: The edge of innovatio...