Arts

Leaning over to him from two seats away this lady says, “You’re Jeff Daniels’ brother, right?” “No,” he said, “Just a fan.”

Netflix is doing a new “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” season.

To paraphrase the slogan in a series of local hospital ads, Antonio Vivaldi is more than his "Four Seasons."

Han Xie , festival guest soloist

That set of four violin  concertos, long subject to industrious redundancy on recordings, is just a picturesque fraction of the Italian master's huge output. Why  should those concertos be entirely overlooked in a concert built on Vivaldi's popularity, which largely rests on them with the music-loving public? Unthinkable!

So the Indianapolis Early Music Festival's 'Viva Vivaldi IV: Motets, Arias, and Concerti" on Sunday featured the "Summer" concerto, with soloist Han Xie and the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, to bring the tribute concert up to intermission at the Indiana History Center.

A native of China, Xie joined the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in 2017. His training at the Peabody Conservatory took in a burgeoning acquaintance with the baroque violin. In this guest appearance, his approach to "Summer," whose programmatic content is anchored in a sonnet like its other companions in the "Seasons" set, was restrained but still colorful.  The detached phrases, thoroughly synchronized with the IBO and concertmaster Allison Nyquist, suited the seasonal character later immortalized in song by Nat 'King' Cole as lazy, hazy, crazy.

Vivaldi's craziness is largely centered in the finale with its thunderstorm and hail onslaught. The ensemble texture was thickened appropriately by theorbo player William Simms picking up baroque guitar.  Xie and the band thoroughly dug into nature's outburst. Also admirable was the performers' artfully blurry yet detailed depiction of insects annoying the poem's tired shepherd yearning for a few moments' rest.

The bulk of the composer's 500-plus concertos are for the violin. Grove's Dictionary's Vivaldi article tells us the solo instruments ranking next highest in frequency are bassoon, cello, and oboe.  No bassoon in the spotlight was represented Sunday, though the program notes mention that the Oboe Concerto in A minor is based on a bassoon piece. That  work opened the program, with Kathryn Montoya as soloist. Her tone was on the acerbic side, and a few notes in running passages didn't sound fully, yet the zest and rhythmic dash typical of the composer came through. The staggered ensemble entrances in the finale served as a reminder that Vivaldi occasionally indulged in the joys of counterpoint, though he was far from the specialist in it that Bach was.

The other concerto brought IBO member Joanna Blendulf to the fore for a Cello Concerto in F major. The  sequential writing so beloved of the composer came out of the gate breathing fire in the first movement. The slow movement was attractively scaled back to accompany the soloist with theorbo and second cello. The piece was neatly dispatched, though to me it represented the vast plateau of Vivaldian ordinariness.

Esteli Gomez is a returning guest artist of the Early Music Festival.

Finally, it was a treat to hear again soprano Esteli Gomez in three works for voice and ensemble: two sacred motets and an opera aria. Vivaldi's skill in tone-painting — so much a part of the popularity he enjoys via "The Four Seasons" — was evident especially in the aria "Zeffiretti, che sussurate." The whispering little breezes of the title are nicely suggested by the two violins in close harmony. The text's depiction of love's voice being reflected in various aspects of the pastoral scene was echoed by the adroit dialogue of voice and instruments. Gomez's ornamentation, especially in the elaboration of the opening material, had consistent radiance and precision.

As for the motets, in "In Furore in lustissimae irae," her expressive variety  between representing God's fury with sinners and a sinner's plea for mercy was especially vivid. In "Nulla in mundo pax sincera," she managed the interval leaps well in the evocative line (here in translation) "Amidst punishment and torment lives the contented soul, chaste love its only hope."  The recitative was demanding after its own fashion, with melismas tossed off in the singer's urging us to flee the world's deceitful snares. In both motets, the virtuosity she exhibited in the concluding "Alleluia" movements was astonishing.

Vivaldi, whose reputation has never quite amounted to master status, was nonetheless well served by performances that represented his enduring attractiveness. And yes, he is certainly more than his "Four Seasons."

Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie, “The Art of Self-Defense,” opened in a downtown Brooklyn mall where nobody need ever ask, “What are you wearing?”

"The World of Leonardo" extends to our world in surprising ways, such as the record-setting sale of his painting
"Salvator Mundi" at auction for $4.5 million a year ago November.

Leonardo Da Vinci's high-priced painting "Salvator Mundi."

The work, whose provenance has come under question in a way that might have limited its fame before it was gaveled down at that phenomenally high bid, was among the screen images that enhanced a concert featuring a host of musicians, including members of the locally based Alchymy Viols and Echoing Air, and two dancers. The program was conceived and directed by Mark Cudek, artistic director of the presenting Indianapolis Early Music Festival, and Phil Spray, who guides Alchemy Viols.

The program was focused on Leonardo's enduring genius, a legacy also represented by two other images much imitated and admired: "The Last Supper" and "Mona Lisa (La Gioconda)." But painting was only a small part of his multifaceted genius.  His inventions, many taken by their creator only to the design stage, were far-reaching, anticipating technological advances centuries in the future. Several were presented for viewing in the Indiana History Center lobby as realized by students under the direction of Woody Bredehoeft,

The music drew upon dance, song, and sacred forms of the 15th and 16th centuries. The social purpose of dance in Renaissance Europe was embodied in Catherine Turocy's stately choreography for costumed dancers Kali Page and Joe Caruana. Complementary movement in and around the ensemble was well-conceived so that neither dancers nor musicians were distractions for the other. The resulting balance could thus be seen as well as heard.

Esteli Gomez, a soprano who added so much to Ensemble Caprice concerts for the festival in 2015 and 2018, was featured in frottole (secular songs) by several composers, such as the melodiously named Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Marchetto Cara. Her idiomatic rendering of tremolos in Tromboncino's "Ostinato vo seguire," an assertion of the value persistence in love, was among her many stylistic triumphs.

She is an expressive singer without mannerisms that might obscure her technical security. This was a useful display of versatility in numbers that, for all the similarities they share in creative milieus and forms, span a wide range of secular and sacred purposes. With the assistance of three male singers from Echoing Air, Gomez made special the celebrated "Puer natus est" of Heinrich Isaac, an a cappella Gregorian chant setting.

The instrumental ensemble was notable for its pinpoint coordination and the occasional virtuoso spotlights shone upon its adept members, especially lutenist Ronn McFarlane.

Phil Spray came forward at several points in the program to deliver spirited reminders of Da Vinci's genius and notable incidents of his life, several of which have come down to us through Giorgio Vasari's landmark biographies in "Lives of the Artists." That's the source of the Leonardo death narrative, with the artist being comforted in his final moments by the King of France, his most illustrious foreign patron. Leonardo's hometown of Florence had become a less welcome place to him, according to Vasari, because of a bitter rivalry with Michelangelo.  In Vasari's telling, piety overcame the artist during his final illness — a reminder that Leonardo's stature as a secular saint to posterity is far from the whole story.

Given that Vasari ends his account with praise chiefly for the knowledge Leonardo imparted about the anatomy of humans and horses, a dance-based program was an obvious emphasis for a concert evoking the setting of his innovations. Not everything could be covered, so why not stress form and its physical components as brought forth musically? Any one of several directions could have been taken to honor Leonardo on the 500th anniversary of his death, and this one seemed a most natural and well-executed choice for the 53rd annual festival.