Concerto

The subtitle for Samuel Richardson's novel "Pamela" is "Virtue Rewarded." It thus cannot be an easy name to live up to, but Pamela Frank did so last night in Meyerhoff Hall when she played Dvorak's Violin Concerto in A Minor with David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.She is a wonderful player -- one of the very best of our time, I think -- and she gave as fine a performance of this piece as anyone is likely to hear for a long time.The virtue that is rewarded in this preternaturally mature young violinist -- she is only 24 -- is her open-heartedness, an emotional generosity that suffuses every note of her playing.

Some musicians develop firm ideas about how to play a particular piece and stick to them no matter what. Others keep their options wide open. Emanuel Ax is one of the latter, which helps explain why this Polish-born pianist has been a major force in the classical music world for 35 years. Ax, who performs Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this weekend, is celebrated for the freshness of his music-making, as well as a brilliant technique. "I learned this concerto when I was 21," said Ax, who turns 62 next week.

Pianists who perform Beethoven's Concerto No. 1 in C Major usually fall into two groups: those who play the familiar, shorter cadenza and those who choose the longer, more difficult third cadenza written almost 15 years after the concerto's 1795 premiere. Short-and-early cadenza folks (Fleisher, Argerich, Gilels and Lupu) almost invariably place the concerto in a classical, almost Mozartean context; long-and-late ones (Richter, Michelangeli, Pollini) usually justify their choice with large-scale, dramatic performances that suggest the C Major concerto's Romantic progeny.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra doesn't always generate hot sellers for its annual summer season, but it sure has a cool concert this year, surely one of the coolest programs in decades. Marin Alsop, the BSO's intrepid music director, will lead the ensemble in examining two sides of an intriguing coin — orchestral works written by a Baltimore-born rock star, Frank Zappa; and a symphony written by a Baltimore-born composer, Philip Glass, inspired by the rock songs of David Bowie and Brian Eno. That would be cool enough, but Friday's performance at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall also features Baltimore beatboxer Shodekeh.

That Liszt once compared the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 to the story of Orpheus taming the Furies is apparently apocryphal: There is no record of Liszt saying or writing such a thing and the story probably originates with Donald Francis Tovey's essay on the piece.But the fact that this metaphor has taken such hold in the imagination -- you cannot read a set of program notes without an account of it -- proves how apt a description it is. The piano's yielding, pleading phrases do indeed conquer the fierce, stentorian cries of the orchestra: It is Beethoven at his most operatic.

I feared the worst last night in Meyerhoff Hall for Gershwin's Concerto in F.I expected conductor David Zinman to choose tempos that were much too slow for the piece and for the Baltimore Symphony to play in a too-refined manner that would make Gershwin's trashy-flashy minor masterpiece sound bloated.Zinman did exactly as I expected -- he led the slowest performance of the Concerto in F I have heard and his approach was indeed refined.What surprised me was how much I enjoyed it. Instead of sounding bloated, Zinman's affectionate and coaxing, even seductive, response to Gershwin's blues-based melodies made the concerto sound unexpectedly (and delightfully)

The owners of Concerto, a Triple Crown prospect stabled in Maryland, have decided to race their colt in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness -- after a final tuneup April 19 at Pimlico.Hank Steinbrenner said yesterday that the horse deserved a chance in the spring classics after winning four consecutive stakes, including the Grade II Jim Beam Stakes at Turfway Park. Steinbrenner manages the horse business for his father, George, the owner of Concerto.John Tammaro III trains the horse. He is stabled at Laurel Park.

Every time this listener hears Elmar Oliveira play the violin -- whether it is a concerto, a solo recital or chamber music -- he is elated by the magnificence of his playing and also a little saddened. The sadness derives from the circumstance that Oliveira, who performed Saint-Saens' Concerto No. 3 in B minor last night with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and conductor Christopher Seaman in Meyerhoff Hall, has never received the recognition due a musician who may be the finest American-born violinist of his generation.

They were all there yesterday.Algar, the Maryland Million Classic winner. Waited, who beat Algar in their last meeting. Testafly, who ran a respectable third to Skip Away. Warrenpeace, a nose loser to Algar in the Classic.But when the $100,000 Congressional Handicap ended, former Kentucky Derby runner Concerto was in the Laurel Park winner's circle after holding off Waited by a head in a stirring stretch run."His class won," said Don Gross, a shipper who represented trainer Bill Mott. "He did what he was supposed to do. Today, I think they knew they had this horse to beat."

Mstislav Rostropovich has taken more than a few critica shots during his tenure as music director of the National &L Symphony Orchestra, but no one doubts "Slava's" ability to recognize a first-class cellist when he hears one.He is God's own gift to the instrument, after all.Rostropovich's hiring wisdom was borne out Saturday evening when a pair of his NSO cellists, Steven Honigberg and David Teie, joined Gisele Ben-Dor and the Annapolis Symphony for a...

A big trend in classical music over the past several decades is historical authenticity, the attempt to re-create how works sounded when they were new. This usually involves repertoire from distant centuries, but pieces from relatively recent times can come in for the authentic treatment, too. A case in point is the latest Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program, devoted entirely to George Gershwin. This presentation, conducted by Marin Alsop and showcasing the superb French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, does raise an interesting question about the whole historic reclamation business.

Although it's convenient for some to think of music being divided into totally separate worlds, with the classical variety way over in some isolated corner where only the "elite" indulge in it, there are innumerable connecting, welcoming points between genres. One mission of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's new season is to emphasize such links, programming works that reveal roots planted in folk music or jazz, for example. Last week, bluegrass found its way into the picture via a concerto by Jennifer Higdon featuring a hotshot crossover trio; this week, the folk influences behind familiar pieces by Tchaikovsky and Bartok are being given fresh attention.

The first time violinist James Ehnes visited Baltimore, it was to catch a game at Camden Yards. Don't hold it against him, but he was rooting for the Red Sox. He's been a fan since he was a kid, when his father would drive him to Boston from their home in Canada. "The highlight was going to Fenway Park," Ehnes says. This week, he'll try for a musical homer with his 1715 Stradivarius, playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. At his BSO debut in 2007, performing a Mozart concerto, Ehnes left quite an impression with his refined technique, sweet tone and elegant phrase-making.

Shortly after signing a new five-year contract that will keep her in the post of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director until 2015, Marin Alsop led the ensemble in a hefty program Thursday night that included the East Coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto. Written for Baltimore's own classical music star, Hilary Hahn, it's a killer of a concerto for the soloist, and it asks a lot of listeners, too. Cast in three movements, the half-hour concerto makes a grand statement, packed with thematic material and expansive development, all of it delivered with extraordinarily prismatic colors.

A comment posted by a viewer on one of violinist Hilary Hahn's many YouTube videos sums up her appeal neatly: "You're just too cool, Hilary :)" The stellar 29-year-old fiddler, still based in Baltimore, where she grew up and started her musical training, has her own YouTube channel. It features informal Q&A sessions with viewers and disarming clips Hahn films in her dressing room or other spots when she's on the road. "I meet these neat people, and doing interviews is a way I get to know them," Hahn says from Vienna, Austria.

Jonathan Leshnoff's Violin Concerto struck me as a major addition to the repertoire when I first heard it in 2006. I'm even more convinced of that quality, having revisited the work on an all-Leshnoff CD from the Naxos label that features violinist Charles Wetherbee and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Markand Thakar. Leshnoff, a Towson University faculty member whose international career has been developing rapidly, found inspiration for the concerto in a chilling tale he heard from a Holocaust survivor - how inmates, forced by SS guards to sing Nazi propaganda songs, subtly wove prayers into the music.

Composers inevitably reveal much of themselves in just about anything they write, but when they choose the piano concerto as a medium, the revelations have a way of becoming particularly telling. You can get a strong reminder of this in the latest Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program, which offers two exceptional examples - and a superlative soloist to facilitate the communicating. Mozart couldn't be more direct and open-hearted than he is in his Concerto No. 27; for all of its grand C major flourishes and decorative trimmings, what shines through is an incredible eloquence and ingenuity of expression.

Thrown off-course by a rude visitor named Isabel, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra opened its 2003-2004 season last night at Meyerhoff Hall 24 hours later than scheduled, but without really missing a beat. A packed house was on hand to hear a program that might have been labeled, at least by low-imagination marketers, "Something Borrowed, Something New." John Corigliano's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, which had its highly anticipated premiere, borrows from his Academy Award-winning film score The Red Violin, but contains a great deal of fresh material; John Adams' The Chairman Dances borrows from the first draft of his groundbreaking opera Nixon in China, but has its own life; and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 2 borrows liberally from Ukrainian folk songs, yet takes them on new paths.

He writes verse, and one of his poems won an international poetry competition. He paints, and one of his works was displayed on the Web site of a major British newspaper. He blogs for another major British newspaper. He composes music that gets performed in high-profile places. He's the author of a book on prayer. Oh yes, and Stephen Hough also plays the piano. Brilliantly, incisively, compellingly. The British keyboard artist and 21st-century Renaissance man, a recipient of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called "genius grant")