A sunny guitar concerto helps ICO cast bright rays on winter's approach

Celebrity status to performers on the classical guitar is rare.  Sharon Isbin is one of the few since Segovia

Sharon Isbin showed her luster as classical guitarist.

to claim that status. On Saturday night at Butler University she shared her aura with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. under the direction of Matthew Kraemer.

The main vehicle for Isbin's artistry was Karen LeFrak's "Miami Concerto," whose three movements carry Spanish names reflecting the character of each. The atmosphere is sunny and relaxed, reflecting the  colorful Miami of Miami Beach more than the overbuilt metropolis choked with high rises. 

The work is less a showcase for the soloist's virtuosity than a rich canvas on which guitar and orchestral colors are shared. The rhythmic heft of the guitar, with its percussive articulation, was joined neatly with the percussion section in its outer movements. The contrasting slow movement allowed the guitar's lyrical quality to shine, and when its songfulness recedes, it naturally lends rhythmic and harmonic support to the ensemble's melodic turn.

In some respects, the piece is less a concerto than a kind of blend featuring the guitar, the way Falla's "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" features the piano in thorough partnership with the orchestra. It was Isbin's encore, Antonio Lauro's waltz called "Natalia," that offered the audience a welcome taste of Isbin's breadth of skill across her instrument's palette and dynamic range.

Kraemer's program-building acumen shone in the rest of the concert, starting with Jacques Ibert's "Divertissement," a foretaste in the French idiom of the humor displayed in the program's final work, Dmitri Shostakovich's Ballet Suite no. 1, a confection that's also in six movements but in the Russian composer's most informal and (rarely) exuberant style. 

The comic potential of the trombone exercises itself in both works. "Divertissement" has more signs of unity, with such effects as the fanfare-laden "Parade" setting up nicely the "Finale," which opens with an outburst from the piano, yielding to a generalized wildness topped by a police whistle.

Shostakovich's suite draws upon his youthful experience accompanying silent films, repurposing that useful music during a period of government repression in the late 1940s when no amount of innovation met with official approval.

The orchestra offered a wealth of shipshape fun in miniature, with such drolleries as a flute-tuba duet in the middle of a predictably lively "Polka." That movement was a harbinger in spirit of the "Waltz-Joke" that followed and the zesty "Galop" that wrapped up the program.

The artistic zenith of the concert was undoubtedly the Maurice Ravel classic suite, "Le Tombeau de Couperin," an orchestration of a piano piece that leaves out one movement to pare the revision down to four. As fit as the orchestra was overall in this performance, the palm must go to principal oboist Leonid Sirotkin, whose playing was magnificent in variety of color, nimbleness, and nuance of mood. Moreover: The flowering of the masterly orchestration could not have come across better than in the ICO's fortunate home, the Schrott Center.