Jay Harvey Upstage

Marc-Andre Hamelin doesn't impose his personality on a variety of music so as to build a cult following. 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 inside know...

One of many good things said to come in threes (so far) is the collaboration between the Indianapolis Symphony   Orchestra and Indianapolis Ballet. The fairy-tale formula of the threefold charm fits perfectly with the current production of "The Sleeping Beauty." The Petipa-Tchaikovsky masterpiece tops all stage and screen versions of Charles Perrault's beloved fairy tale. In the first of three performancees Friday night in Clowes Hall, the guiding force was the company's interim director, Michael Vernon, succeeding the inspired founding director Victoria Lyras, who retired late last year. The production looked splendid, sets and costumes alike, especially in the first scene, The Christening, in which the traditional rite for infants at society's highest level is at the peak of splendor. Yoshiko Kamikusa danced the Rose Adagio on opening night. But of course, an error of royal etiquette, the seneschal Catalabutte's failure to invite the wicked fairy Carabosse,...