20th Century

An unusual collaborative effort among three Baltimore organizations will put the spotlight on 20th-century chamber music next June. Offering seven concerts in three days and making use of three different string quartet ensembles, the New Chamber Festival Baltimore promises to be a lively addition to the local music calendar. "The 20th century was the most prolific musical century we've ever had," says Bill Nerenberg, managing director of the Shriver series and president of the festival.

At the top of the Creative Alliance calendar this month is a benefit for the Reservoir Hill-based youth outreach program Kids on the Hill. At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, the alliance will present an eclectic program including animation made by members of Kids on the Hill, real-life stories written and read by them, and, as the anchor of the evening, a half-hour video, History Hill, which investigates Jewish and black experience on Reservoir Hill throughout the...

For Sir Richard Eyre, his six-part television series Changing Stages is an exercise in the art of the impossible. "Theater insists on being live, in the present tense," he says in the opening episode. "It can't be recorded. You can't show it on television." Or, as he puts it in the handsome coffee table book he co-wrote with playwright Nicholas Wright to accompany the PBS series, "Making television programs about the theater is as quaint a folly as putting ventriloquists on the radio."

FROM THE TIME he won an Evening Sun harmonica competition as a youngster, Larry Adler pushed the envelope for that humble instrument. A few years later, he was a star of vaudeveille, then radio and movies. The wise-cracking, short young man from Baltimore was a giant of showbiz in the 1930s for whom the leading classical composers of the day wrote concertos. He was all mouth when not playing his beloved mouth organ, and all ear when he was. Self-taught, memorizing music by listening to it once, he played with the leading symphony orchestras before he could read music.

Its deck is rotting and its rivets are rusting, but there's no denying the toughness or longevity of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Taney: the last warship afloat to survive the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The 65-year-old veteran of most major U.S. naval operations of the mid-20th century is now a floating museum in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. As part of a Memorial Day weekend celebration, the nonprofit Living Classrooms Foundation is flying in an 80-year-old Coast Guard veteran who was one of the Taney's chief gunners at Pearl Harbor.

FOR TWO YEARS the most popular part of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cone Collection of early modern art, has been closed, its gems on tour. With other parts of the BMA closed for renovation and much of the Walters Art Museum closed for the same purpose at the same time, museum-hopping, museum membership and museum reverie have been in sad decline in Baltimore. Fortunately, that's over. The Walters Art Gallery helped prepare for its comeback, still awaited, by renaming itself Walters Art Museum, which is deemed more informative.

About halfway through "An American Century of Photography," the impressive survey of 20th century photography at the Delaware Museum of Art, there's a picture by Lewis P. Tabor that neatly sums up the eternal debate over whether photography is an art or a science. The picture shows a great spiral galaxy, similar to our Milky Way, floating serenely amid the inky vastness of space. Surrounding it are what seem like thousands of tiny points of light, which actually are the stars lying between us and the distant object.

To preservationists seeking to protect the historic character of Charles Street in Baltimore, a plan that could lead to the demolition of three turn-of-the-century buildings in midtown would in most cases seem counterproductive. Especially when community leaders just completed a revitalization plan that encourages preservation of historic buildings throughout the area. But that's what the Baltimore Development Corp. has proposed in legislation now before the City Council. And surprisingly, the plan has received support from several groups that normally would oppose demolition of older buildings on Charles Street.

Marjorie S. Holt became the first Maryland woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972. Elsie D. Barber became the first Anne Arundel County woman elected to the General Assembly in 1923. Cynthia A. Carter became the first African-American woman elected to the Annapolis city council in 1997. "Women have broken a lot of ground here in the county," said Bea Poulin, community services specialist for the county executive's Office of Constituent and Community Services. During tonight's Women's History Month celebration, the county will honor those women and the 58 other county women who were elected or appointed to public office during the 20th century.

The Baltimore Chamber Orchestra spent most of Wednesday evening luxuriating in the polychromatic realm of 20th-century French music. It was a substantive and rewarding venture. For this concert at Goucher College's Kraushaar Auditorium, conductor Anne Harrigan came up with a mix of serious, sensual and lighthearted repertoire that had in common a certain subtlety of expression. True, Darius Milhaud's "La boeuf sur le toit" is not without blatant effects - a rollicking Brazilian tune that keeps coming back for one more whirl round the dance floor, all sorts of piquant dissonances - but there's still something refined about it. Harrigan had the ensemble bouncing through the piece with a good deal of character, if not always tight coordination.