Jay Harvey Upstage

Pavel Berman divided his program between violin recital and chamber music. Thirty years ago, Pavel Berman, a participant in the third quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis , had come out of the soon-to-dissolve Soviet Union illustrating all the careful preparation and solid technical grounding the West had come to expect of musicians steeped in the rigors of Russian training. The 20-year-old violinist captured the Gold Medal and has returned to Indianapolis just once since then. In the meantime, he has enjoyed years of experience as concert artist and teacher. For about eight years starting in 1998, there was also considerable experience on the podium leading an orchestra he had founded in Lithuania. On the evidence of his appearance in the IVCI Laureate Series Tuesday night, Berman has put the time since his triumph here to good use. He has put a masterly finish on his impressive command of a variety of repertoire during two intense September weeks three...

Having just turned 50, Pavel Berman has firm plans for the next phase of his career. In a brief, rare visit to the United States, the gold medalist of the 1990 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis i s back in town under IVCI auspices to appear in its Laureate Series Tuesday night at the Glick Indiana History Center. Consistent with his wish to put the violin at the center of his activities and to explore a variety of music for this instrument in combination with others,  the violinist has established the Pavel Berman Ensemble near his home in Italy, where he's lived for many years. From that base, the ensemble will undertake short European tours. Pavel Berman has focused on teaching as well as performing over the past 30 years. "We will play pieces like Tchaikovsky 'Souvenir de Florence,' a Brahms sextet, Schoenberg's 'Verklaerte Nacht,' and also baroque concertos," he said, adding that the programs will feature him as soloist in vi...

In its current production, Fonseca Theatre Company has made a chamber opera out of the spoken word on the topic of gentrification. It's a hard-hitting blend of arias and ensembles, punctuated by violence of language and action. Josh Wilder's "Salt Pepper Ketchup" has just another week to go at the company's cozily proportioned new home on West Michigan Street. This kind of show, at home in Daniel Uhde's set design, benefits from the compact focus the space lends to the action. At FTC's Christmas show, I had serious doubts as to whether the space available would ever see any sort of variety show with humor, song, and dance seemto be at home: Pizazz with its shoulders scrunched barely works. That remains to be seen, of course, and I trust Bryan Fonseca's imagination to to come up with solutions more than my mere speculation as FTC builds a production history. For the time being, however, "Salt Pepper Ketchup" seems both snug and explosive ...

Her full investment in a recent concerto was evident. The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra on Saturday weighed in with the obligatory tribute to Beethoven in his 250th anniversary year, but the performance of the Symphony No. 8 in F major, op. 93, conveyed much more than a sense of obligation. In common with the other two pieces on the program at Butler University's Schrott Center for the Arts, the Beethoven salute had a feeling of genuine commitment, even touches of rapture. Matthew Kraemer conducted an account that was straightforward, free of mannerisms, and responsive to the work's variety of texture and mood. The notable replacement of the conventional slow movement by an "Allegretto scherzando," with its pervasive ticking, was droll enough to avoid the purely mechanical. The look backward to the minuet, which Beethoven had earlier transformed into third-movement scherzos, had simply the touch of nostalgia at which the ICO hinted in its concert marketing. B...

So, here we have it: the classical-music icon, the work that could be identified by the packed-together name "Beethoven'sFifth," the musical objective correlative of triumph, and our grandparents' indelible notion of a Victory Symphony, because its generating motif of three short notes and one long one corresponds to the Morse code for "V." During World War II, that famous beginning was officially Allied propaganda. But it was already well-known, and has thus come to symbolize classical music to many people in blissful ignorance of all that the term embraces.  It probably still tops "O Fortuna!" from "Carmina Burana" and "Nessun dorma" from "Turandot" in terms of mass familiarity. Yet it's a remote monument to many who are otherwise wholly at the mercy of pop culture. Once, as a young teacher, I exposed my high-school English class to the opening of Stravinsky's "L'histoire du Soldat," with re...

Giancarlo Guerrero showed his pizazz and control. I kept resisting comparisons to Leonard Bernstein that popped up in my head as I watched Giancarlo Guerrero conduct the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Thursday night at the Palladium . But images of the venerated American conductor leading his New York Philharmonic are still vivid to me several decades after attending their concert at the Meadow Brook Music Festival near Detroit. Gesturally flamboyant and with an astute actor's range of facial expression, Guerrero had tempted me to draw the parallel throughout the scheduled program of Szymanowski, Bartok, and Brahms. But it was his showmanship in the two encores that cemented the comparison. Just as Bernstein had stood vibrating and twitching while the orchestra with which he made his reputation dashed off his Overture to "Candide," Guerrero set aside conducting in all but a few places during predictably spirited accounts of Dvorak's Slavonic Dance No. 8 and Johann S...

For years, two critiques of theater by famous novelists have stuck in my craw, and I can't say that either one is easy to dismiss. I can minimize them, though. So I was happy to be confirmed in my belief in the viability of stage drama by the richness of Indy Actors' Playground 's January "cold reading" last night. Attempts by John Updike and Martin Amis to disparage theater rest on two different foundations, both of them worth considering, yet faulty. Lou Harry and Paul Hansen, co-masters of these long-running revels, once a year depart from the format of a reading chosen by one actor, who selects a cast of fellow readers; then the ad hoc troupe comes to the Playground with minimal to no rehearsal.  In IAP's "cold cold reading," actors are invited to participate by the founders and handed an envelope with their parts marked. It's showtime. Until a given signal to begin, they don't know what's inside. Monday's show, an amusing bu...