Columbia Orchestra

Any concert featuring Beethoven's 3rd "Leonore" Overture, Gustav Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder," Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" and the Fifth Symphony of Jean Sibelius is a special event on its own merits.The Columbia Orchestra's final concert of the season at 8 p.m. Saturday at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre takes on a significance that goes beyond even this celestial repertoire. It will be Catherine L. Ferguson's last as music director.After nine years at the ensemble's helm, she leaves to do further graduate study.

In general, amateur and semiprofessional orchestras give wide berth to works such as Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka, and who can blame them? Premiered as a ballet score for the Ballet Russes of Paris in 1911 and refurbished by Stravinsky as a full-scale work for the concert hall in 1947, Petrushka is a mighty tall order for all but the most elite orchestral players. Its harmonies flirt with bi-tonality. Instruments (especially the trumpets and clarinets) are assigned murderously difficult parts, and a host of mind-boggling rhythms fly out of the orchestral textures nonstop.

Anyone unschooled enough to think all musicians sound the same would have received comeuppance Saturday evening when the Columbia Orchestra took the Jim Rouse Theatre stage to present the winners of its 2001 Young Artist Competition. Two gifted Howard County music pupils were featured, and their artistic personalities couldn't have been more different. Alice Lee of Dunloggin Middle School in Ellicott City, the competition's Junior Division winner, played the opening movement of Franz Joseph Haydn's C major Cello Concerto.

"Da da da dum -- da da da dum."That's what concert-goers can look forward to when they attend the Columbia Orchestra's 15th season opening next Friday at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre.Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 dominates a bold program that includes the overture from an opera about love, lust and forgiveness, and a concerto by an American composer who uses overtones of Jewish mysticism to trace his Armenian heritage."The first concert will feature the familiar Beethoven's Fifth," said Cathy Ferguson, conductor and musical director, who tries to schedule a Beethoven concert at least once a season.

A host of complementary forces will come together Saturday evening at the Jim Rouse Theatre when the Columbia Orchestra takes the stage to present a concert program titled "Mozart and More." To begin with, there's the juxtaposition of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the two bulwarks of music's classical age whose works will be performed. Haydn, tradition tells us, was so bowled over by the genius displayed by his junior colleague that he told papa Leopold Mozart, also a composer, that young Wolfgang would eclipse them both before he was through.

The Columbia Orchestra will commence its 26th season Saturday evening at Jim Rouse Theatre and, fitting for this time of year, a pair of autumnal masterworks will dominate the proceedings. "Each is an extraordinary valedictory statement," says conductor Jason Love of Tchaikovsky's final work, the alternately graceful and brooding 6th Symphony, subtitled Pathetique, and Elgar's grand, noble and deeply felt Cello Concerto, the last major composition by the English master. "Both pieces contain interludes of grief," says Love, who begins his fifth year at the Columbia helm with this weekend's concert, "but each has its share of gorgeous, even fun, moments."

Jason Love is that rarest of musical breeds -- a young conductor actually making his living from conducting before reaching his 30th birthday. "That is a little uncommon in this country," said Love, 29, a graduate of Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory who was named in the spring to lead the Columbia Orchestra. "Not that I didn't have to sell ladies' shoes at JC Penney's to help ends meet along the way." But, mixing and matching engagements, Love has become one of the area's busiest, most enterprising conductors.

The Columbia Orchestra will head for the heart of Mother Russia on Saturday without ever leaving the friendly confines of Howard Community College's Smith Theatre. Music Director Jason Love has elected to conclude the orchestra's 2000-2001 season with a pair of works at the epicenter of Russian Romanticism: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony and the sumptuously melodic "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" by Sergei Rachmaninoff. A short, hyperactive burst of American minimalism - John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" - will round out the program.

What do an old castle, an ox cart, unhatched chicks, a bustling French marketplace, two Jewish people, and a grand design for a never-built czarist monument have in common?Classical music aficionados can answer that one easily.These are just some of the scenes captured in the paintings and drawings of Russian artist Victor Hartmann -- images that would inspire the artist's friend Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)to compose the most famous museum stroll in the history of music.Linked by a catchy "Promenade" theme that depicts an art-lover determinedly on the move, Mussorgsky's suite of 10 piano pieces inspired by Hartmann's art became "Pictures at an Exhibition," a work still considered one of the great romantic showpieces composed for the keyboard.

Anyone who thinks drug-induced musical dreams are exclusive to 1960s rock-'n'-rollers doesn't know classical music very well.For sitting at the core of the symphonic repertoire is Hector Berlioz's immensely colorful "Symphonie Fantastique," the five-movement tale of a fixated lover and his opium-inspired dream gone bad.With its hair-raising "March to the Scaffold" and a phantasmagoric "Witches Sabbath" punctuated by the sounds of demons, sorcerers and...