Jay Harvey Upstage

George Li didn't shy away from Beethoven's imperial breadth.  Compositional nicknames are inevitably grafted onto works that are formally known by type, key, and opus number. Even the knowledgeable segment of the public wants a word or phrase to hang onto. So, from the "Moonlight" sonata to the Symphony of a Thousand, the labeling identifiers persist.  The origin of such nicknames is sometimes obscure and often lacks the composer's stamp of approval. The eminent British essayist Donald Francis Tovey opened his concise scrutiny of Beethoven's Piano Concerto E-flat, op. 73, with this brush-off: "From the history of the 'Eroica' we know how Beethoven would have appreciated the vulgar title by which this concerto is known in the British Isles. So we will say no more about that, but attend to the music."  In the English-speaking world  the nickname "Emperor" has spread beyond Tovey's homeland, and the musicologist's first phrase

A traditional partnership of two well-established musical organizations made its annual presence felt again Tuesday night to welcome a chamber-music newcomer with a familiar face at the head: Jaime Laredo, who has chaired the jury of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis for the past 30 years, is the violinist of Espressivo. Besides the IVCI, the Ensemble Music Society presented the concert. Espressivo: Robinson, Laredo, Polonsky, Pajaro-van de Stadt Laredo and his wife, cellist Sharon Robinson, for several decades performed together with the late pianist Joseph Kalichstein as a piano trio that carried their names. They are the foundation of Espressivo, which also counts violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and pianist Anna Polonsky as members. The program at Indiana Landmarks Center  featured an Espressivo co-commission, "Joy Steppin'" by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, that had received its premiere Monday in Cincinnati. "Joy Steppin'" is about 12 minut

Avery Gagliano got the Premiere Series of the 2025 American Piano Awards off to a robust start Sunday afternoon at the Indiana History Center. Avery Gagliano now studies with Schiff. She is the first of five finalists to be presented here in solo recitals plus a concerto performance, one each month through February. That will be followed by adjudicated chamber-music performances, then a finale featuring the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in April after which the top prize will be awarded. After her Curtis Institute of Music training, the 23-year-old pianist from Washington, D.C., has just started studying with Sir Andras Schiff in Kronberg, Germany. Immediately with her program opener Sunday — J.S. Bach's  French Suite No. 4 in E-flat — some suggestions of Schiff's Bach style, the Bach-on-piano standard for me in recordings to counter the powerful Glenn Gould approach,  were apparent. There was the suave legato displayed in the Allemande, then the vivid definition of the le

It's been a hundred years since the ultimate in crossover musical achievement premiered: Geroge Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." In celebration, Jack Everly, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's principal pops conductor, has made the pioneering work for piano and orchestra the centerpiece of the season's second program in the Pops Series.  The celebratory concert Friday was all-Gershwin at a high level, heralded by the mayor's proclamation that Oct. 11 was a day in honor of the ISO in its 40th-annniversary weekend at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Apart from the "Rhapsody," with the solo part incisively performed by Stewart Goodyear, the focus was Gershwin's songs. Everly told the huge audience, with some pride, that there are 30 songs in this show.  Some of them were in a few show overtures, of which several had choral arrangements by Eric Stark, artistic director of the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, which sang them.  The large chorus seemed to b

The repertoire formerly embraced by the term "Negro spirituals" occupies a unique place among music to have emerged from the New World. The melodies and the passion behind the songs forged a sustaining insight that can be appreciated on both musical and spiritual levels. They have generated a wealth of arrangements. Philip Spray, violone and director That range is confirmed and vividly embodied in orchestrations for an early-music ensemble of harp and strings, using arrangements by several historically significant black musicians. Philip Spray directs Alchymy Viols in "Deep River: Spirituals Cross-Currents," a program compatibly presented with countertenor Michael Walker II. The Navona Records release benefits throughout from glowing performances exquisitely recorded.  Michael Walker II in the recording studio Walker's well-centered, floating tone is displayed immediately in the first piece, "Over My Head," sung without accompaniment. Later there i

Among the puzzling cliches this music critic has found in the writing of some colleagues is the tendency to object to variations in tempo that strike the reviewer as breaking the momentum or introducing hitches in a work's steady movement forward. I think any variations in tempo that the score doesn't explicitly require are not necessarily interruptions in the cohesiveness of symphonic movement, for example. Sometimes they convey the meaning of a composition more fully than a narrowly precise performance.  Granted, complicating the pulse of a piece of music can verge on unsteadiness, for which the conductor ought to be held to account. I'm not saying that  bending "interpretation" in matters of tempo can't be excessive. But often I wonder: Is the reviewer really bothered by that variety such that the music becomes hard to follow, almost unintelligible? Or is the point simply to cavil at an interpretive choice for the sake of showing off familiarity with the pi

The inimitable Steve Turre as "shellist" If Indianapolis were ever to erect a jazz Mount Rushmore, it would be universally agreed to represent Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, and Freddie Hubbard in perpetual stone. Their legacies have never been lost sight of here, and the latter two have their niches in the current  Indy Jazz Fest .  The Freddie Hubbard tribute portion of the 2024 official kickoff Saturday was intense, but carried too much compacted energy to suit the confines of the Jazz Kitchen . Taken as a whole, the evening's schedule suggested the expansive vibes of the outdoor extravaganza that historically was always risky from the standpoints of weather and financing. At the risk of sounding like a kindergarten teacher, what I heard last weekend used its outdoor voice, not much of its indoor voice. It was clear that time constraints were part of the difficulty. It's not just that Hubbard, one of a handful of universally acknowledged jazz masters from Indianapol

Your word is "sconce." Spell "sconce." Past master Rona Lisa Peretti supervises the bee. May I have a definition, please? A bracket candlestick or group of candlesticks. Could you use it in a sentence for me? On the way up a side aisle after the opening night performance of "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," I rammed my right shoulder into a sconce. Sconce, s-c-o-n-c-e. That's a real-life example generated from my exit experience Friday night at Indiana Repertory Theatre. Fortunately, the hurt didn't last long, vanishing overnight. My weekend bit of doubles tennis wasn't notably affected today, being about as chockfull of errors as usual. From now, on, I will be more careful watching things attached to walls I move next to.  In the actual event recalled in my example of a spelling-bee sentence, two aspects of the hazards I ran into long ago on the classroom spelling-bee level occur to me. One is the dumb-bunny risk of confusing it w

Bria Skonberg leads the charge on trumpet Wednesday.  The direction she's traveling in musically with her current recording picks up on Bria Skonberg' s link to Louis Armstrong, her first trumpet idol as a budding musician in far-off Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. Now she's established on the New York jazz scene and building devotedly on the legacy of Armstrong's hometown.  Heading a quintet at t he Jazz Kitchen scheduled as an appetizer for the Indy Jazz Fest, which officially kicks off Saturday, the trumpeter-vocalist lost little time in performing "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." For the second set, she sang and played the song, third on the set list,  as if there was no doubt that she knows. And indeed, that current CD is titled "What It Means." I trust her as a true believer in her inspiration from Satchmo: She pronounces his first name as he did, sounding the "s." (Remember his late-in-life hit, where he begins

Claire Wilcher plays a contestant pleased with her Constitutional savvy. The two founding documents of this country used to occupy different places in my estimation. As a young student, the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence swayed me more (though I once had to sit down in a classroom spelling bee for rendering "of" as "o-v," mindlessly hearing the word's sound of "f" in my junior-high head).  Later, the exaggeration in the document's complaints against the Crown turned me off: such a ton of special pleading. "A decent respect for the opinions of mankind"?  Oh, come on! More like a scorned elite's justification of rebellion on steroids. In college, the Constitution gained stature with me because it avoids rhetorical flourishes, and I'm so pleased it never mentions God as the guarantor of any of our government's structures or the people's rights. (Are you paying attention, Christian Nationalists?)  And then there a

  Why not start at home with "Justifiably J.J." (Summit Records ), John Fedchock's tribute to a master Light and shadow of top trombone: John Fedchock trombonist? Here is my impression of the last of eight tracks, recorded when Fedchock came to town to celebrate the centenary of J.J. Johnson last March at the Jazz Kitchen . The new disc closes with "Ten 85," memorializing the house number of  Johnson's last residence in his hometown. It's one of those compositions as  confirming of Johnson's immortality as his trombone playing. It zips along as the theme unfolds, bright and life-affirming, before yielding to an exhibition of the fleet style Johnson developed as he showed that the nimbleness of bebop could be adapted to an instrument not by nature suited to it. He displayed the agility of the trumpet, without the need to extend the trombone's range ever upward. In heading a quartet of Indiana jazz masters — pianist Steve Allee, bassist Jeremy Al

Patriarchy can have life-defining consequences at home, especially when its lofty representative in a boy's Travis Abels about to be devoured by sin monster life is a beloved father. "Things I Hide From Dad" is an autobiographical IndyFringe Festival show of compelling intensity and focus that has three more performances at the District Theatre .  This personal account from a Hoosier man long resident on the West Coast, where he went on a painful journey of self-liberation, is lively and exquisitely designed. Recorded sound and Travis Abels ' movements around the stage are coordinated to a fare-thee-well and always germane to his narrative.  His struggles to reconcile his admiration for his father with the pulls of his body toward forbidden pleasures are symbolized by a secret closet. Into it Travis keeps trying to confine temptations as they accumulate and become monstrous. The boy's acceptance of the cult-like variation of Christianity that his pastor father a

  Paco Erhard knows his people well, and his "5-Step Guide to Being German" drives that knowledge Paco bends over backwards for Germany. home, with useful supplements on people he's gotten to know on his extensive travels. Americans' devotion to the flag, he supposes, is intended to reassure them they are still in their own country, and haven't been as footloose as he. Most of us know the word "Wanderlust" as well as we do "Gesundheit!" A native of Munich, the comedian turned his given name into his surname and put "Paco" in front at the suggestion of a neighbor in Spain, where he was studying many years ago. Like most Spaniards, apparently, she couldn't handle the letter "h," making "Erhard" come out as a kind of guttural stammer, a throat-clearing mess. "Paco," on the other hand, rolls off the tongue across the globe. Certainly fluency of thought and language is at the center of Erhard's comed

Though it's not required, summer camps often boost their uniqueness with scary tales featuring local boogeymen, always effective around the campfire. In IndyFringe Festival' s "Camp Summer Camp," a mystery holds the plot together like a crafts project executed by an all-thumbs camper.  But that's all to the good for the sort of ensemble "laff riot" Defiance Comedy specializes in. The show is a successor to 2023's "Being Rob Johansen," a parody that also thrust forward the Defianceista named in the title. Even so, the energy was distributed well, with a small host of off-the-wall characterizations shaped to a focused result. Thus it continues in "Camp Summer Camp."  If you have summer camp experience, it may resemble this show only obliquely, but that will be enough to resonate amid the generalized madness. Adolescent as well as preteen self-consciousness will generate anxiety and curiosity, as it did in my memory of camp. One of

 If you have ever said to yourself, urging acceptance of a situation you don't understand and cannot Tim Mooney concentrates the identity action of "Twelfth Night." change, "It is what it is," you have lived in Shakespeare's Illyria, landlocked in reality, but with a seacoast to suit the playwright's purposes. Indianapolis has benefited from two striking full-staged productions of "Twelfth Night" in recent years: Southbank's vivid, musically rich one in 2022, and a party-hearty, expansive version at Indianapolis Shakespeare Company's old White River State Park home, when in 2015 the company carrried the acronym HART as identifier. How people identify is central to the plot and character twists of the Bard's comedy, making the show ripe in 2024 for the kind of freeze-dried treatment Tim Mooney specializes in. "Breakneck Twelfth Night" lives up to the squeezes Mooney has put on "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet

 The august setting of Indiana Landmarks'   Grand Hall offered a nice upgrade for an advance look at August's main theatrical dazzle here: the IndyFringe Fest , whose history has had much to do with putting Mass Ave on many a local destination fun list. Previous previews I've attended have been under a tent outside Station No. 2 Firefighters Museum  on the Skipping, leaping, floating: Snowflake in action Avenue near one of downtown's busiest intersections. Without distractions, Wednesday night's performances unfolded onstage under the decorative organ pipes of the Grand Hall.  They were meticulously timed at two minutes each under the enthusiastic control of "Snowflake," a mime/dancer/timekeeper of grace, verve, and surefire comedy improv skills. Two others shared emcee duties, near the stage, from the back, and up and down the aisles. There was always something to look at, with quips and information thrown in during brief pauses between Fringe performers

It's not surprising that family values are an enduring issue of political and cultural resonance.  Even at Ensemble: Bridget (from left), Emma, Alice, Lizzie their gory worst, they are in part responsible for the pop-culture fascination with Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of the 1892 murders of her socially prominent father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. What went on there for a long time before the reputed double parricide of Aug. 4, 1892? Speculation and sleuthing have been rife for 132 years. The heroine of "Lizzie," a musical by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer and Alan Stevens Hewitt that's just opened at Phoenix Theatre , refers to herself as "the Yankee Clytemnestra" in one song. The link to ancient sources of violent death in the family amounts to a natural cultural archetype for this New England legend of enduring allure. The creators of the musical take what's known to be true and exploit it, weaving in legendary elements, through relia