Hear a Story
Watch a Story
Symphony Presents Tall Teller of Tales
by Jay Harvey
printed in The Indianapolis Star November 24, 1986
More information on Jay's Performances with Orchestras
Music and storytelling are time-bound arts with some shared elements; introductory and linking material, suspense, repetition and variation, climaxes and so forth.
So it shouldn't be surprising when they get together in a mutually enhancing way, as they did twice Sunday afternoon when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's Family Series opened at the Circle Theatre.
Jay O'Callahan, a lanky Massachusetts storyteller, was the afternoon's featured performer, with his original adaptation of Peer Gynt stories to go with Edward Greig's suite of the same name.
With a voice that encompassed booming heights of emotion and nearly whispered depths of mystery, O'Callahan spun his tales with interludes by the orchestra of four movements of Grieg's music, one of them repeated at the end.
Caught at the 2 o'clock concert, O'Callahan displayed remarkable timing and a sense of theater that went beyond the way he used his speaking voice to his gestures and postures. The physical aspects of his art were just as spare and packed with meaning as his eloquent text.
The orchestra accompanied its storytelling guest with complementary picturesqueness under the baton of William Henry Curry. In particular, the string sections captured the opposite moods of Anitra's Dance and Ase's Death with spirit and discipline.
When O'Callahan wasn't on stage, the drop in excitement was palpable. The warhorse from Lohengrin was saddled and ridden with mastery as well as vigor, but The Sorcerer's Apprentice was given a cool, balanced appraisal. This was an Apprentice with both feet on the ground.
Where Curry's straightforwardness perhaps sold the music short was in two movements of the Berlioz symphony - March to the Scaffold and Dream of a Witches' Sabbath.
The March sounded especially restrained. Such a detail as deliciously grisly as the "plunk, plunk" that traditionally signals the moment the protagonist is dispatched was simply glossed over. And Dream of a Witches' Sabbath was almost as free from murk and dread as if it were a kind of 19th century Jukebox Saturday Night.
Despite notes in the printed program, the lack of a spoken introduction to the two excerpts was regrettable.
Curry might have provided as helpful a guide to the music as he had before the performance of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. At least that would have brought a rather plain performance closer to the zest of narrative art as demonstrated by O'Callahan.