Cellist Joshua Roman rehearses with the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra and Maestro Scott Terrell on Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Click the play button to hear a podcast of our interview with Joshua Roman:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

The Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra may have bigger named soloists its schedule this season, but that may only be temporary.

At 25, cellist Joshua Roman already has some big credits on his resume, including being the only soloist during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra presentation, becoming the Seattle Symphony’s principal cellist at age 22, and being named artist of the month by Musical America magazine in August.

We caught up with Roman back stage after a rehearsal to talk about things like being called a “classical rock star” for our story in today’s Weekender and the podcast, above.

Click the play button to hear a podcast of our River of Time report for WEKU-FM 88.9:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

The University of Kentucky Opera Theatre presents the world premier production of composer Joe Baber and librettist Jim Rodgers’ River of Time Oct. 8-10 at the Lexington Opera House. The opera, commissioned by UK Opera, looks at Abraham Lincoln’s early years including his search for purpose in his life and the roots of his desire to fight slavery. Photos by Rich Copley | staff.

Feature: Lincoln Opera portrays a ‘journey to greatness’

"Milkless" (2004) -- Jahi Chikwendiu encountered this young mother in the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. He recalls: "She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business. Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village." Descriptions and images courtesy of The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. All images copyright The Washington Post.

I know I am not the only person at the Lexington Herald-Leader who knew Jahi Chikwendiu was a remarkable talent the moment I met him. So his award winning career at The Washington Post comes as no surprise, nor does the decision of the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky to show Jahi’s work as part of the prestigious Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series. To preview his exhibit, I caught up with Jahi earlier this week before he started a busy day on the job for the Post.

Click the play button to hear our podcast with Jahi Chikwendiu:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Here are a few more images from the exhibit.

"Sally Sami, a blogger who left her home country of Egypt (reflected)" (2007) -- Digital print Courtesy of the artist and The Washington Post In Egypt, there are growing restrictions on bloggers who receive threats of arrest for expressing and publishing what are considered anti-government and/or anti-Islam views. Another Egyptian blogger, Karim Amer, was jailed by an Egyptian court for four years for “insulting Islam.”

"Wall of Thorns" (2004) -- Hawa Oosman Adam rests in her temporary home of thorns and twigs where IDP's (internally displaced people) have made an impromptu camp on the outskirts of Nera, Sudan. Some families, including Hawa's, have had to move six times during the course of this 20-month-old conflict where African settlements are being attacked by the government with the help of militias known as the janjaweed.

"Darfur Sandstorm" (2004) -- On his first day in a vast refugee camp in Darfur, Chikwendiu was standing on a water truck at the edge of the camp to survey the scene when a dust storm rolled up. He recalls: "I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was. So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses."

“Black Hawk Down” (2003) — Mourners at the Washington D.C. funeral of a soldier killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Iraq.

Click here to read our story about Jahi.

Click here to see more of Jahi’s work at his website.

Cynthia Lawrence rehearses Richard Strauss Four Last Songs with conductor John Nardolillo and the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Friday night is diva night in Downtown Lexington.

On one side of town, we have Angela Brown kicking off First Presbyterian Church’s new philanthropic concert series. On the other side, we have the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra opening its season with new voice faculty member Cynthia Lawrence singing Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs.

Whether you head to Singletary or not, Lawrence is someone Lexington music lovers will be getting to know as she settles in to teach aspiring divas and divos, and turns in the occasion performance herself.

Click the play button to hear our podcast with Cynthia Lawrence:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Click the play button to hear our chat with Kevin Skinner:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

When I first heard about the singing chicken catcher from Mayfield, Ky., I said, “Oh, no.”

My fears had nothing to do with cultural stereotyping, or anything like that. It was that Kevin Skinner was starting his run on America’s Got Talent hot on the heels of two spectacular reality show flameouts.

There was Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scottish woman whose first appearance on AGT’s sister show across the pond, Britain’s Got Talent, became a YouTube sensation. And then there was Adam Lambert, the enormously talented American Idol contestant whose performances put him in a class by himself.

Both looked like shoo-in’s to win their reality/competition series, and both did not.

Not to take anything away from Boyle and Lambert’s worthy competitors, but it felt from Internet chatter and general commentary that their losses were due in part to voter fatigue with them — with Boyle’s come-from-nowhere story and with Lambert’s boundless talent. In competitions like this, viewers don’t like to be told whose going to win (or who should win, in the case of Simon Cowell’s Lambert endorsement) and they can turn on frontrunners.

Skinner’s debut on America’s Got Talent (that’s the clip, above) was somewhat Boyle-esque. He came from exceedingly humble roots, had judges and the audience cackling over his accent and his accounts of chicken catching, and then blew viewers away with his rendition of Garth Brooks’ heartbreaking ballad If Tomorrow Never Comes. Right away, his clip was being singled out on morning talk shows that referred to him as an American Susan Boyle.

But fortunately for him, that didn’t happen — not that Boyle’s done bad for herself since BGT.

Now, I didn’t keep up with AGT religiously. It’s been a crazy summer. Skinner buzz sort of subsided, and there was even a moment I wondered if he was still in the running. Other acts caught the public’s attention, from opera singers to 75-year-old comedians, most of them very talented people in their own respects.

Skinner, like a humble guy from Mayfield, kept his head down and played his music, and ultimately still had the most viewer-voters on his side at the end of the competition. He avoided a trap of overexposure that had swallowed two talent show darlings earlier this year and came out a $1 million winner.

Press the play button to hear our podcast with Balagula Theatre co-director Ryan Case.

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Balagula Theatre opens its first official season Sunday, Sept. 13 with ‘B’ for Beckett (A Night of Samuel Beckett’s Plays). It kicks off a lineup of absurdist, exesstentialist theater at Natasha’s Bistro and Bar, including works by Eugene Ionesco and Jean Paul Sartre.

Read more about Balagula and Studio Players’ season opener, Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest here.

And see an Unexpected Guest slide show here.

Billy H.W. Mason and Heather Parrish perform with June July on June 27 at Lower 48. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

While she was in rehearsals for Studio Players production of Always . . . Patsy Cline, we caught up with Heather Parrish to talk to her about playing the country music legend and how it impacts her own band, June July. Here’s a podcast of a portion of our chat with Heather:

Further reading:

• Story: Patsy is a bridge between Parrish’s theater and rock ‘n’ roll careers.
• Story: Louise is a dream role for Wilkeson.
• Review: You’d be crazy to miss it.

Israel Houghton and New Breed make an Ichthus debut Saturday.

Click the play button to hear our interview with Israel Houghton:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Israel Houghton has heard the criticism over the years.

“When I moved to Nashville, I basically had people saying, ‘You’re too black for this, you’re too white for that, pick a style,” Houghton says. “And I remember saying, ‘What happens when we get to heaven? What section are we planning on being in?’”

It was a purposefully rhetorical, idiotic question, Houghton says.

Over six albums and more than a decade, Israel & New Breed have energized and sometimes puzzled Christian music fans with a mix of styles from traditional gospel to world music to rock ‘n’ roll, with lots of other elements thrown in. It’s a mashup that has won Houghton critical acclaim as well as Grammys and Dove Awards.

But it sometimes left the core audience, the church, a bit puzzled.

“So much of it is at our core,” Houghton says, “so much of it is rooted in ignorance, and a lot of it just has to do with stereotypes and skin tones, and we’ve always done church this way so we should keep doing it this way.

“Worship, in its nature, ought to be encompassing, it ought to be multicultural, and it ought to have the ability to tear walls down. Finally, thanks be to God, we’re finally seeing where that is becoming less and less and less of an issue.”

And Houghton is venturing into new territory, including the Ichthus Festival, where he and New Breed will play Saturday night.

Houghton says the band has played summer festivals, including the annual Creation, festivals, but the band has hardly been a staple of the circuit.

But again, the band is breaking down walls, something he says he recently saw on a 38-city tour with superstar worship leader Chris Tomlin, who has played several Ichthus festivals in the past.

“We come out, and people look at us like a deer in the headlights because they aren’t there to see us and they think they don’t know our music,” Houghton says. “Then we start to play, and they realize they’ve been singing some of our songs in church for years.”

Those songs include Friend of God, You Are Good and Say So.

Ichthus director Jeff James says that one of his intentions in booking Houghton for the 40th edition of the festival was to mirror one of Ichthus’ early hit artists and a barrier-breaker in his own right: Andre Crouch.

“It’s not the 40th time that I’ve heard that,” Houghton says, laughing. “I know Andre well. He’s been a mentor to me, and anybody who asks me, ‘Who are your primary influences?’ I always mention Andre first because that was the music that really changed my life and led the way for what I now do.”

So it’s a nice comparison. It’s just that with Israel Houghton, the comparisons hardly stop there.

The last chance to see Delirious live in Kentucky will be Saturday night at the Ichthus Festival.

Click the play button to hear our interview with Martin Smith of Delirious:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

When Delirious first played the Ichthus Festival in 2001, then- festival director Rick LaDue put the booking in historical terms.

“We’re the oldest Christian music festival in the country,” LaDue said. “Delirious is a band that is part of Christian music history. We needed to meet.”

The history that Delirious made was integrating praise-and-worship music with rock ‘n’ roll.

Until the late 1990s, there was Christian pop and rock that you heard on the radio, and contemporary praise-and-worship music that some churches used in their services. But it was not often — maybe the occasional chorus, like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith’s Thy Word — that you heard a Christian top 40 song used in worship services.

Then, Delirious started playing youth events in England, pumping up the praise with songs like Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble.

Now, just eight years later, Delirious returns to Ichthus for its last festival appearance in Kentucky, at 10:20 p.m. Saturday.

Later this year, on Nov. 29, the band will play a farewell concert in London, then the members will go their separate ways.

“We’re happy at what God’s done over the years but sad because it’s going to end,” frontman Martin Smith said in a phone interview. “It’s a good time to do that. It’s not a breakup in that we’ve fallen out or anything. We’re still fantastic mates, and in the future we may play again. But for now, it’s time to pursue other things.”

All of the band members are fathers now, which makes them want to be closer to home, and they have other music and ministry projects to pursue.

Keyboardist Tim Jupp, for instance, has launched a music festival in England, and Smith is heading up CompassionArt, a new charity to combat international poverty.

Delirious recently built a medical center in India, illustrating the biggest turn in the band’s career, changing a focus from pure worship music to encouraging its audience to take up social-justice causes with songs like Our God Reigns and its last studio album, Kingdom of Comfort.

“We’re called to look outside our own lives and see that the majority of people living on the planet are miles and miles away from the affluence of basic wage-earners in the West,” Smith says. “We are passionate about inviting people to see places like India and Africa and highlighting those things. It has been a great journey for us, and a lot of the songs recently have been reflecting that journey.”

The songs are, of course, what will endure with Delirious. A number of them are contemporary worship staples. That frequently puts members of Delirious in the position of going to a service and, whether people know they are there or not, hearing their own music.

“It happens quite a bit where you find yourself somewhere and they’re doing one of your songs, and you’re always amazed to hear all the different versions that happen,” Smith says. “We’re humbled first by the fact that people like the music, but even more that they want to do it themselves and do their own version.”

He’s heard things like a “jazz-lounge version of I Could Sing Your Love Forever that was brilliant.”

Asked about his own favorite songs, Smith doesn’t go for the standard “all my songs are like children” answer that many artists give. He very quickly names the hit History Maker.

“That’s been a constant of our career, to tell people, ‘You must believe you are on the planet to do more than just exist,’” Smith says. “You’ve got to go for your dreams and what you feel to be inside of you — to be a part of making history together.”

That provokes the question: Does Smith think, as others do, that Delirious has made history?

“Other people should be the judge of that,” Smith says. “The great thing about Delirious is we’ve been around for a while, 17 years this year, and that’s a good, long stint for a rock band. We’re amazed some of these songs have become part of the woodwork and people are singing our songs across the planet. That’s just amazing.”

Roger Leasor plays Marcus Hubbard in On the Verge's production of Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest" at the Hunt-Morgan House. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Click the play button to hear our interview with Roger Leasor:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Also, see our slide show from Another Part of the Forest.

Roger Leasor feels as if he’s come full circle with On the Verge’s ­production of ­Another Part of the ­Forest, and not just because he’s playing the father of a ­character he played last fall.

“When I started performing, it really was as a storyteller in high school, reading to the kids at the public library,” says Leasor, 58.

In subsequent years, he became an actor and a singer at the University of Kentucky, focusing on those crafts.

“But now it comes back full circle,” Leasor says. “What I really want to do is tell the story, and I have all these tools to do it with. I just don’t have the youthful energy to do it or the free time.”

Leasor is chatting in one of the offices of his day job, at the Harrodsburg Road Liquor Barn. As president of the expanding party and spirits business, Leasor has found he spends much of his time overseeing operations in Lexington and Louisville.

He jokes that after ­Another Part of the Forest, he will enter his 19th and last retirement from the stage. But despite his schedule, some roles are too good to pass up.

“These are opportunities that just don’t come along, Leasor says. “I’ve just been so lucky all my life to be given these amazing roles. It takes that anymore to justify the time, and it takes someone like Ave that wants you to work with them.”

Director Ave Lawyer is the most recent person to lure Leasor out of his umpteenth retirement with the opportunity to play the patriarch of the Hubbard family, playwright Lillian Hellman’s treacherous Southern clan, a group that demonstrates how much emotional terrorism can be inflicted while decked out in formal wear.

In the fall, Leasor played Ben Hubbard in Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Now, in Hellman’s prequel to Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, Leasor is playing Marcus Hubbard, Ben’s father.

In "The Little Foxes," last fall, Leasor played Ben Hubbard, Marcus' son. Bob Singleton, right, plays Ben in this show.

“With Ben Hubbard, I was consumed by the fact that he was always conniving, always planning,” Leasor says. “I got the feeling that before he took each breath he was trying to decide which side of the mouth it should come out on. … Well, this is his daddy. Who do you think he got it from?”

Indeed, Marcus is as treacherous as Ben, minus the subtlety.

Leasor says they are both roles that probably startle some who have followed his stage career, particularly recently.

His last few turns have been noble, warm characters - Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the stage manager in Our Town - roles that seem like typecasting when you talk to Leasor.

Maybe his harshest role of recent vintage is Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind, a character whom you had to admit had good intentions, even if you disagreed with his point of view.

There is nothing good or selfless about Marcus ­Hubbard or his son.

“It’s a little unsettling, but it’s just one more story,” Leasor says. “That’s what you’re here for, to tell the story.”

In the case of these two plays, Leasor really likes the way Lawyer is telling them. Foxes and Forest are “site-specific” productions, produced in the rooms of two of Gratz Park’s most storied homes, the Bodley-Bullock House for The Little Foxes last fall and the Hunt-Morgan House for Another Part of the Forest. As in The Little Foxes, there are only 16 seats available for each performance. But those small audiences get an intimate look at the show.

“This is what I think we all thought acting for the camera was, and it isn’t,” Leasor says. “A lot of people got into acting to be able to do little and tell the story. For the camera, you do little, but you don’t tell the story, because it’s all cut up, you’re jumping around and there are a thousand things going on.”

By little, Leasor means playing quiet, subtle moments that don’t necessarily translate well on a traditional stage. But they do come across well if you are seated in a room with a dozen or so people and the actors.

“This is what you thought it was,” Leasor says. “You thought it was, ‘I’m going to tell the story of Scarlett O’Hara from beginning to end, and nothing’s going to get in my way, and I’m going to tell it to you just like I’m talking over this table.”

Performing in a house much like the one in which Foxes is set was a unique situation for Leasor and his fellow actors. He says it was a huge help in keeping him involved with the story even when he walked off “stage,” because he was still in that environment.

The proximity to the actors also engaged the audience. Some even came close to getting involved in the show, particularly in a scene in which Oscar (played in that production by Paul Thomas) slapped Birdie (Joan Rue).

“One gentleman was halfway out of his chair, and his companion restrained him,” Leasor recalls. “I was flattered when I heard about it, that it touched him in such a special place that he forgot where he was. Isn’t that our goal, to make you forget who you are for a couple of hours? I have a story to tell.”