Hot Jazz and the Beethoven prodigy

3/4/2026

March brings great news for Des Moines’ art scene. As part of Civic Music’s centennial celebration, Bria Skonberg visits Sheslow Auditorium with her bright vocals and Louis Armstrong School trumpet. She is perhaps the hottest act in jazz, having led the Mighty Aphrodite Jazz Band, the Big Bang Jazz Band and Bria’s Hot Five, a direct tribute to Armstrong’s Hot Five. She won the Juno Award for best jazz vocal album of the year for “Bria” and co-founded New York’s Hot Jazz Festival. Vanity Fair thinks she’s the future of jazz.

The Des Moines Symphony is bringing Stella Chen to town for her Des Moines debut. Chen has won just about every award there is for violin prodigies, plus Gramophone’s 2023 Young Artist of the Year in all classical music. With the DMSO she will play her signature Beethoven’s “Violin Concerto.” This is what she said about it a few years ago. 

“Even at 18, it was, for me, the ultimate ideal: a marriage of compositional perfection and devastating beauty. Learning it was both a privilege and a daunting responsibility, for I couldn’t shake the feeling that its quiet profundity belonged to a future version of myself — one I had not yet become.” 

Beethoven shares the marquee with Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony and Smetana’s “The Moldau” from “Má vlast.”  

 

PhArt and the foot

Meanwhile on the east coast, a $1 million marketing fart and a $27 million chalk foot lead the month’s art news. In Philadelphia, the high arts flailed in efforts to divorce their heritage. The once venerable Philadelphia Museum of Art spent a million bucks to have marketing firm Gretel consult on a rebranding. In October they announced the rebirth of the museum as a “coming down from the stairs” (made famous by “Rocky”) and a new era of “merging with the city’s neighborhoods” (made infamous by “Long, Bright River”). They got a new logo with a griffin, and a new name — Philadelphia Art Museum — for their money. 

No surprise, most museum observers who didn’t work for the museum started calling it “The PhArt.” Last month, the museum announced it was trashing the new image and name to return to its traditional missions. They also fired director Sasha Suda, who led the new image charge, though she is suing for unlawful removal. The museum says she was fired for cause, having given herself a hefty salary raise without consulting the board or anyone else. 

The Old Masters had their best year in more than a decade at last month’s auctions. Christie’s New York sold a 5-inch, red chalk drawing of a foot, recently ascribed to Michelangelo, for $27.2 million, beating its estimated price by more than $25 million. A self portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi, painting herself as St. Catherine of Alexandria, fetched $5.7 million and beat its estimated price of $3 million. A Rembrandt drawing of a young lion hammered out at Sotheby’s New York for $17.8 million, a record for a Rembrandt drawing.

 

Touts

“Honey, You’re a Wonderful Model” features the late Austrian feminist filmmaker Maria Lassnig’s hand-drawn animated films from the 1970s. They are “populated by a cast of zany characters performing physical comedy and slapstick antics addressing the complexities of relationships, sexuality, grief, and embodiment.” Through May 17 at Des Moines Art Center.

Des Moines’ most popular artist, Chris Vance, debuts his new exhibition March 6 at Moberg. Our city loves this guy and the development of his own cast of zany characters, some based on his now-grown-up kids. Vance always shows a new facet in his work, and large crowds show up for his openings. 

Olson Larsen Galleries feature new-to-the-gallery watercolor artist Ana Žanić through the first week of April. Her work joins OLG’s popular “Animal Show,” which plays through March 28. 

Soprano Joélle Harvey (last summer’s Anne Trulove in “The Rake’s Progress”) and baritone John Moore (this summer’s George Milton in “Of Mice and Men”) come to Des Moines for a special performance with a variety of solos and duets sung in German, French, Spanish and English. Sunday, March 22, 3 p.m. at Plymouth Church. $50 for preferred seating, $30 general admission and free for students. ♦

Jim Duncan is a food and art writer who has been covering the central Iowa scene for more than five decades.