Jay Harvey Upstage

New staging: Vamp and title character in 'An American in Paris' Rediscovery of the alchemical result of dance and live music together is especially welcome in the fourth collaboration of Dance Kaleidoscope and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra . Opening night of "American Sound" Friday certified the partnership's strength once again at Schrott Center for the Arts. The national theme includes a couple of pieces set to American music with the signature styles of the current DK artistic director, Joshua Blake Carter, and his predecessor, David Hochoy, making welcome returns in the company's schedule. The difference is the animating presence of the ICO, conducted with sparkle and precision by its music director, Matthew Kraemer. Yet the real treat was to get further acquaintance with DK rehearsal director  Sean Aaron Carmon  in his new work, "City on Fire." The piece takes its title and the theme behind its movement from the ensemble number signaling ...

Ebene Quartet paid its third visit here with different personnel  In "The Pilgrim's Progress," Mr. Facing Both Ways is an allegorical no-no in the strict Christian terms of someone who cannot resist looking on both the sacred and profane paths forward. This amounted to one of the author John Bunyan's warnings against waywardness. In musical terms, the evidence of a divided consciousness may also be labeled a fault. Yet Claude Debussy succeeded in forging a new musical style that has amazingly found acceptance among music-lovers with conservative tastes for almost a century and a half. Still, innovation is basic to everything he wrote.  My predecessor as music critic for the Michigan newspaper I worked for long ago memorably dismissed  "impressionism" (a term Debussy rejected but continues to adhere to his music) as "the petering-out of well-worn romantic trails."  But such a performance as the Ebene Quartet laid down of the French composer's St...

 The artistic directors of Ronen Chamber Ensemble designed a program this past weekend where they brought in a guest string quartet to nail down a program titled "Americana" firmly in masterpiece territory. Gregory Martin, Alastair Howlett, Jennifer Christen Oboist Jennifer Christen and flutist Alastair Howlett invited Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra colleagues to play Dvorak's "American" Quartet (no. 2 in F major, op. 96) for the second half of concerts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and the University of Indianapolis. I heard the latter Monday evening after a circuitous drive to the city's south side, thanks to construction along I-65 South. It was worth the extra travel to hear ISO concertmaster Kevin Lin head the guest musicians on the first violin part, with Ziqing Guo on second, Zhanbo Zheng, viola, and CJ Collins, cello.  Lin's leadership, showing his usual connection to the emotional heft of a score on top of technical security, was spectacul...

Residents, stranded passengers reflect on what they've been through.  Disaster generates a leap across barriers of strangeness and reserve in "Come from Away," the final production of Indiana Repertory Theatre 's 2025-26 season. Visited Sunday at the last performance of opening weekend, the award-winning musical  had attracted an audience obviously primed to enjoy an uplifting show.  Its hundred-minute run time requires an extraordinary amount of emotional buy-in. But by now the public comes in already enthralled by the story of how a small town in Newfoundland played generous host to thousands of stranded airline passengers on September 11, 2001. I was well advanced into middle age on that disturbing day, but the audience that "Come from Away" can now attract includes many young people for whom 9/11 takes on the aura of myth.  Like most myths, 9/11 carries a great burden of sorrow. This show touches on that burden often, but the primary emotional payoff is ...

In the tango spirit: ISO concertmaster Kevin Lin  Thematic unity helps symphony programs to cohere in attracting audiences, and who can resist the lure of dance underpinnings even when you're expected to stay in your seat for a concert?  This is what unifies "The Rhythm of Dance," this weekend's Classical Series concerts by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra . There's significant relief, however, in the inclusion of Schubert's deep-delving masterpiece in two movements, Symphony No.8 in B minor ("Unfinished"). The theme is carried out by Richard Strauss's magnificent, sweeping "Rosenkavalier" Suite, with its famous waltzes, by the "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires," by the Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla, and by "Dance of the Paper Umbrellas," an appetizer by the contemporary Uzbekistan composer Elena Kats Chernin, a piece of childlike buoyancy and tenderness similar to the Rossini/Respighi ballet, "La Bo...

My first exposure to the remarkable French pianist Michel Petrucciani was a record marking his early outburst onto the international jazz scene as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1982.  Despite the rapport with audiences Lloyd had dependably, I never warmed to his playing, which seemed a bit like John Coltrane watered down for jazz-curious hippies. It takes an assertive pianist to carve out a firm profile in any quartet led by a saxophonist (classic case in point: McCoy Tyner with Coltrane). The freedom Petrucciani displays in this two-disc set takes the form of a loosened, more expansive style that eliminates the need to compete in facility and impact with anyone else on the bandstand.  The pianist's performance on this gig displays the torrential energy typical of his playing, his strong hands belying the fragility of his body, which was hobbled by a brittle-bones disease (osteogenesis imperfecta) that subjected him to frequent injury and...

One of the landmark small groups in jazz was the nonet that also gave birth to a new branch on the living jazz tree. The growth of a way of playing and writing that owed nothing to bebop and very little to the fading swing era came about in three recording sessions in 1949 and 1950, later to be packaged as a Capitol LP titled "The Birth of the Cool." Kent Hickey put together ensemble for centennial tribute.  Miles Davis was the leader, and his style in these settings raised his profile in the jazz community. This is his centennial year, and so Kent Hickey,  a trumpeter from a much younger generation and one of local renown, took up the birthday banner to lead nine musicians re-creating "The Birth of the Cool."  The band sounded great Tuesday night at the Jazz Kitchen . The driving sound of something new still adheres to "Move," a Denzil Best composition that led off the performance, as it did the original LP issue. That's not counting the short appetiz...

Mitzi Westra's performances are well-remembered.   Mezzo-soprano Mitzi Westra minded her academic Ps and Qs while also  singing with buoyant freedom and expressive heft in a faculty recital Monday night at the University of Indianapolis. "Romance Languages" was the rubric under which selections of Italian, Portuguese, French, and Italian art songs were artfully placed with spoken introductions emphasizing the diction challenges in each of the four languages. The lecture element was succeeded by her enchanting  interpretations, accompanied insightfully by Elisabeth Hoegberg, piano, in Ruth Lilly Performance Hall, Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center .  I have long been pleased to attend Westra's performances, usually in context with other singers, and significantly in such crowd favorites as Handel's "Messiah." The way she put across such alto arias as "He was despised" and "O Thou, That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion"  alone has provide...

Vivian exults in partnering with Di and Val. Like any other sport, warming up for death may be a fitness regime, or it may look like death warmed over. The tension between approaches to the final chapter facing everyone may invite more than a touch of humor.  Wendy Herlich went full bore into mortality's comic potential in writing "Wasabia," a 2024 one-act that the Phoenix Theatre is opening this weekend in the Basile Theater. The booklet for the new production, directed by Brian Balcom on the Phoenix's Basile Stage, carries a playwright's note that indicates personal reasons for dealing with death unflinchingly, as well as humorously. She has centered the emotional glitch that brings humor into play in several episodes that involve two secondary characters in various guises, representing drugs used in assisted suicide.  Legal protection for the choice is under consideration or approved among an increasing number of states. That trend is the subject of one of the...

  Antje Weithaas is ensemble guest on this tour.  After lighter music of great polish and right to the point of coordinated virtuosity occupied the first half, the visiting Israeli Chamber Project, including a guest violinist from Germany, Antje Weithaas , moved into high seriousness with the advantage of familiarity after intermission.   Ensemble Music Society presented the seven visiting musicians in an arrangement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, op. 55 ("Eroica") at the Indiana History Center Wednesday night. Many in the audience had recently experienced the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's performance of the original work under music director Jun M ä rkl's inspired direction. The appropriately well-designed arrangement by Yuval Shapiro was superbly played by the visitors. Simply the repeat of the exposition in the first movement held additional interest that the full-orchestra account wouldn't necessarily provide.  There were details brought out...

Shannon Lee impressed the IVCI jury in 2018. As compatible as pianists working with IVCI participants have long been, new competition terrain in true duo partnership was explored Tuesday night with the Indianapolis return of Shannon Lee, a laureate in the 2018 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. For five years, the Canadian violinist has been collaborating with Russian-born pianist Arseniy Gusev. That's included two recordings that were reflected in the program they offered at the Indiana History Center. Composers have long emphasized equality between the two instruments in bringing their respective techniques and modes of expression into partnership. Works for violin and piano, many of them sonatas, abound in the repertoire.  It was like catnip to the acknowledged master Elliott Carter, an explorer of oppositions in music who found the instruments' physical differences — "between stroking and striking," as he put it — a delectable challenge in creatin...

Martinez plays Falla masterpiece with the ICO.   Marketing this month's Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra concert had the advantage of a glamorous guest soloist, and the organization even used most of the phrase in the title of the work Gabriela Martinez  played in labeling the performance.  "Gardens of Spain" was the concert's billing, highlighting the pianist's  performance with the orchestra in Manuel de Falla's "Nights in the Gardens of Spain." Still, the ICO didn't sell short the world premiere also on the program: a new work by the prolific composer Stacy Garrop, alluringly titled "Chroma," a six-movement salute to colors that the fine lighting system of the Schrott Center illuminated as the composition unfolded under the astute direction of Matthew Kraemer. I first became acquainted with Garrop's artistry in concert more than a dozen years ago with her folklore-linked "Silver Dagger." Since then, when the Lincoln ...

 "Howdy!" is the one-word greeting Branford Marsalis offered to the large crowd gathered to hear his quartet Friday night at the Payne & Mencias Palladium. He may have dropped the salute as something implicitly Hoosier, but it would be hard to interpret it as looking down his nose at us. Neither effusive nor tight-lipped in his commentary, the veteran saxophonist showed the friendly demeanor that has always contrasted with the lecturing stance of trumpeter Wynton, the other household name among the distinguished New Orleans musical family.  He led one long set at  the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts jazz series, fronting a long- Branford Marsalis Quartet: By the third number, the jackets were off. intact group including Joey Calderazzo, piano; Eric Revis, bass, and Justin Faulkner, drums. Early in the performance came two catchy originals by Calderazzo, "Conversation Among the Ruins" and "The Mighty Sword." In between there was a zesty...

We are trained to believe in individual moral responsibility, but it's not making excuses to insist on the larger picture of understanding its limits. How are some of us more stamped than others by inescapable influences that rob us of agency? "Machinal" suggests strongly that for women, particularly a century ago, freedom of action is shaped conclusively by social limits affecting love, work, and family connections. The 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell is worth the expressionist revival that Southbank Theatre Company gives it through next Sunday at Shelton Auditorium. The theatrical style, conscientiously shepherded here under Marcia Eppich-Harris' direction, means that the feeling of events, especially protagonist-centered, is as important as the facts involved. There's no separation between what happens to the main character and how she processes her experience, symbolized and dream-linked as it is. Narrative orderliness is immaterial in this sort of storytelling...

Angela Brown, soprano from Indianapolis On the cultural high ground, no one minds departure from the formulas of presentation, at least when  there's something fresh about it. For symphony orchestras, the time-worn layout, in order, runs: overture, concerto, intermission, symphony. Some of that is intact this weekend as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's Classical Series resumes at Hilbert Circle Theatre. The orchestra's first of two full-length concerts had an overture by a mainstream composer to start with and a symphony by a master to conclude.  To help support the overall feeling of novelty, the overture was the largely unfamiliar one to Weber's opera "Euryanthe," a poster child of good composition let down by a poor libretto. The symphony was the easy-to-overlook No. 8 in F major by Beethoven, a work memorably characterized by Schumann as "a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants" (the seventh and ninth symphonies).  The real novelty ...

Barthold Kuijken, conductor and traverso soloist   If there is plenty of evidence that progress in the musical flowering called the High Baroque can be justly considered "Towards Telemann," as   Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra' s concert Sunday was titled, a host of influences he absorbed must have been responsible. That was explored fruitfully in the program put together and led by its artistic director, Barthold Kuijken, at the University of Indianapolis.  Georg Philipp Telemann's breadth of musical creation was fed by his receptivity to French, Italian, and German styles, types of patronage, and modes of expression. His appeal to his contemporaries and shortly after his time (1681-1767) was straightforward and broadly based, thanks to a succession of courtly appointments that made him more widely known than his contemporary, J.S. Bach. And the theater bug bit him as well. His work as an impresario and composer of opera helped, giving him a reputation for facil...

Marc-Andre Hamelin doesn't impose his personality on a variety of music so as to build a cult following. This is unlike old Hollywood stars, who molded each role onto their public personalities and built their careers on offering the best new version of their marketed presentation, like John Wayne or Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn.  But a personality need not be irrelevant or a distraction if the effort to probe deeply into a composer is sustained: the composer is revealed along with the individuality of the performer, and Hamelin does that to the level of wizardry. Thus a Debussy prelude as an encore has a veiled charm that the pianist seemed to view from the inside out, as though inhabiting the colorations and the linked, unsquare phrasing characteristic of the French composer. The demand to hear more, enthusiastically generated by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with whom he came to Carmel Saturday night, shed that kind of light. Marc-Andre Hamelin played Mozart with ins...