Carnegie Hall

Jonathan Biss, the young pianist who makes his Carnegie Hall recital debut on Friday and will repeat the program at the slightly more modest Shriver Hall on Sunday, could easily have become a violinist. But as he tells it on the bio page of his website, "the highlight of his career as a violinist took place when he was a fetus. " A few months before his birth in Indiana in 1980, Biss writes, "he performed, prenatally, the Mozart A major Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall, with the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Lorin Maazel.

I grew up in Baltimore, attended school here, and after graduating Hopkins, moved to New York City. I've spent my adult life working in New York, and I'm thinking of retirement in several years. The excitement and glamour of New York are counterbalanced by the high cost of participating in that excitement and glamour. Then there's the astronomical rents. Rents in Baltimore are retiree-friendly. There's the symphony, art museums and my extended family who live here. I am seriously considering Baltimore.

The student: Victoria Zhang, 10 School: Ellicott Mills Middle Special achievement: During the summer, Victoria played piano at Carnegie Hall in a student recital. The audition process involved sending a tape to the Music Teachers Association International headquarters. Schoolchildren are also evaluated based on any music prizes and contests they have won. At the recital, Victoria played Chopin's Impromptu No. 1 in A-flat major. She began playing the instrument at age 6. She also plays clarinet.

For generations, music students have been getting gold stars, certificates and other pats on the back from their teachers. But a budding musician with high marks in one state is not necessarily on the same level, judged by the same criteria, as a budding musician in another. Such positive reinforcement may soon carry a lot more weight countrywide. Launched by Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, the Achievement Program seeks to establish the first national standard in the United States for measuring musical aptitude in students of all ages.

It's an important week for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. On Saturday, the ensemble returns to Carnegie Hall after a two-year absence, bringing with it the daunting challenge of Mahler's Symphony No. 5, which we'll hear first at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on Thursday and Friday nights. It's the kind of work that can bring out the best -- and worst -- of an orchestra, not to mention a conductor. And since it's a work that has been played on the Carnegie stage by the world's greatest orchestras -- not to mention conductors, again -- the pressure is just a wee bit greater.

ON AND OFF THE AIR:* Here's another blurring of the line between television and reality, illustrating how TV sometimes exists within its own world in which the rest of us can participate only vicariously.On yesterday's edition of "CBS This Morning" (7 a.m. weekdays, WBAL-Channel 11), a significant segment was devoted to co-host Paula Zahn's pending cello performance with the New York Pops Orchestra last night at Carnegie Hall.We saw tape of her rehearsing with conductor Skitch Henderson (once the bandleader on "The Tonight Show")

NEW YORK - About 2,000 admirers of the music of Morton Gould filled Carnegie Hall's parquet and the lower two balconies yesterday afternoon to pay tribute to this eclectic composer of symphonic works, Broadway musicals, ballets and film scores.The program, called "A Celebration of Morton Gould," was presented by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, of which Gould had been president for eight years. Gould died Feb. 21 at age 82.Gould's successor, Marilyn Bergman, presided over the tribute, a nearly two-hour program that included performances that touched on the enormous range of styles Gould's music encompassed, as well as recollections by friends and colleagues, and videotape of Gould himself.

To Eric A. Larson, music is "the highest form of communication and the purest."And to an orchestral musician such as Mr. Larson, the ultimate goal is to play at Carnegie Hall in New York City."

It is safe to say that most dream visits to the Big Apple don't include hours of strenuous rehearsal, but the Annapolis Chorale wouldn't have it any other way.Even a mere 48 hours before a Carnegie Hall debut, it's still practice, practice, practice.At 3 p.m. Sunday, 91 members of the chorale will file onto America's most famous stage to perform the radiant Requiem of Gabriel Faure. The singers will be joined by several smaller choirs from Louisiana and Texas and accompanied by the New England Symphonic Ensemble.

NEW YORK -- Perhaps it was the record earnings, the near-record stock price or the board's decision to raise the dividend 60 percent -- or perhaps it was just the elegant setting in Carnegie Hall.Whatever the reason, Primerica Corp.'s annual meeting yesterday was an amiable, brief affair, interrupted only for laudatory comments from the 80 people spread throughout the famous New York theater's hundreds of seats."When you have a great artist, the hall fills up," said Chief Executive Sanford Weill in a moment of reflection after the meeting.

Jonathan Biss, the young pianist who makes his Carnegie Hall recital debut on Friday and will repeat the program at the slightly more modest Shriver Hall on Sunday, could easily have become a violinist. But as he tells it on the bio page of his website, "the highlight of his career as a violinist took place when he was a fetus. " A few months before his birth in Indiana in 1980, Biss writes, "he performed, prenatally, the Mozart A major Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall, with the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Lorin Maazel.

Florence Foster Jenkins could most easily have summed up her, um, art, by paraphrasing a line from The Importance of Being Earnest: "I don't sing accurately - anyone can sing accurately - but I sing with wonderful expression." Excruciating expression. Jenkins, whose sold-out recital at Carnegie Hall in 1944 is the stuff of legend, inspired Stephen Temperley's amusing, affectionate, somewhat-overpadded show Souvenir, which opened Thursday at Center Stage with the original stars of the 2005 Broadway production.

If you thought YouTube was just for cheap audio/visual kicks, many of them along the lines of the people-falling-down, pets-going-nutty stuff that turns up on tacky home-video TV shows, think again. This week, an ambitious, very 21st-century project called the YouTube Symphony Orchestra was launched, creating an online community of aspiring musicians. YouTube and parent company Google put together this cyber ensemble, which has no less than eminent conductor Michael Tilson Thomas as artistic director.

NEW YORK - "This is exactly what my father wanted," Jamie Bernstein said yesterday afternoon, wiping away tears after a gripping performance of Leonard Bernstein's Mass led by Marin Alsop in the vast, gilded United Palace Theater at 175th St. and Broadway. "This was incredible," the composer's daughter said. That performance, attended by more than 3,000 people, found the stage crammed with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Morgan State University Choir and the large cast that, on Friday night, had brought down a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall that included actor Alec Baldwin and writer Anna Quindlen.

When the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night, it will offer musical experiences that haven't been encountered in that iconic venue before -- a work from 2005 by imaginative American composer Steven Mackey, and a concert led by vibrant American conductor Marin Alsop. That the New York-born Alsop, the BSO's music director, will be making her Carnegie debut with this event comes as a surprise; that she is showcasing contemporary music on the program does not. Although she performed many times at Carnegie as a violinist, starting in her teens, with various orchestras and ensembles -- "I know how to sneak in and everything," she says -- this marks her first appearance there as a conductor.

Introducing children to the performing arts is an excellent New Year's resolution, and parents and grandparents can easily meet that goal at two events this month at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts: the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra's family concert, "Tchaikovsky Discovers America," on Saturday, and the Russian American Kids Circus on Jan. 13. The orchestra has made bringing classical music to children its mission, which may well pay dividends later...

Genuinely great performances are rare -- as rare, in fact, on the PBS series of that name as anywhere else.Tonight's first telecast in the 23rd season of "Great Performances," however, captures a very great performance indeed. The concert, which was taped at the Oct. 5 gala opening of the Carnegie Hall season, features the Boston Symphony Orchestra; its music director, Seiji Ozawa; and the young Russian pianist Evegeny Kissin in a program of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and his Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique")

"The Music and the Tradition Continue . . ." say the banners that fly over New York City's Carnegie Hall.At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon, conductor Ernest Green and 91 singers from his Annapolis Chorale took the stage at America's most famous tabernacle of music and officially entered into that tradition.The Chorale's Carnegie appearance occurred under the auspices of MidAmerica Productions, a New York agency that has been booking concerts for the past decade.Mr. Green and his Annapolitans were joined by five high school choruses from Texas and Louisiana in a performance of the radiant "Requiem" of the French composer Gabriel Faure.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will help pay tribute to Leonard Bernstein at New York's Carnegie Hall next season, performing his eclectic Mass with the Morgan State University Choir and Brooklyn (N.Y.) Youth Chorus. BSO music director and Bernstein protege Marin Alsop will conduct the Carnegie performance Oct. 24, as well as another concert the next day at the United Palace Theater, a restored vaudeville/movie venue in the uptown New York neighborhood of Washington Heights. The second performance will involve hundreds of New York City public-school students.

Twenty-nine year-old Katherine Valdez was a latecomer to Pottermania, not becoming a big-time fan until 2000, the year the fourth book in the Harry Potter series was published. But since then, she swears, she's been one of the faithful. "Oh yes, definitely, I did the whole thing," says Valdez, a Charles Village graphic designer when she's not busily keeping up with Harry and his friends as they try to save the world from the evil Lord Voldemort. "I was at the Senator at midnight when the films opened.