Three stars
Indiana History Center; Sept. 21

Who knew that Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra music director Kirk Trevor had a lovely, grown daughter who could bedazzle an audience with her violin pyrotechnics? Trevor began the ICO season featuring Chloé Trevor soloing in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Op. 14. An early work of the long-lived 20th century American composer, its first two movements hearken back to lyrically inclined Romanticism while its final movement suggests a runaway train with sparks flying off its wheels. It was the latter movement in which Chloé was the most impressive, handling her rapid passage work with ease and technical assurance, in a nice blend with an equally dazzling orchestra. On the more sustained notes in the earlier movements, Chloé’s tone varied from thin to slightly wobbly. In her encore — the Preludio from Bach’s E Major Partita for solo violin — she again showed some rough spots and was briefly off pitch. Aside from the “some” and the “briefly,” however, Chloé’s musicianship was excellent. Kirk Trevor began the program with a very short piece, The Banks of the Green Willow, Idyll for Small Orchestra, by the short-lived, late-Romantic British composer George Butterworth (1885-1916). Sounding Elgar-like, it suggested a smile-through-moist-eyes feeling. To close the program, Trevor gave us a scarcely more than routine reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F (“Pastorale”), Op. 68.