Conservatory

After seven years as director of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Jeffrey Sharkey is stepping down. He will remain with the conservatory until a successor is named. "So much of what I hoped to accomplish I feel I have accomplished," Sharkey, 48, said Friday. "But there's an arc to a leadership position. I think that fresh eyes are always a good thing. A new burst of energy will be good for Peabody, and for me, too. " Peabody, the nation's oldest conservatory, opened in 1866.

After seven years as director of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Jeffrey Sharkey is stepping down. He will remain with the conservatory until a successor is named. "So much of what I hoped to accomplish I feel I have accomplished," Sharkey, 48, said Friday. "But there's an arc to a leadership position. I think that fresh eyes are always a good thing. A new burst of energy will be good for Peabody, and for me, too. " Peabody, the nation's oldest conservatory, opened in 1866.

The Howard Peter Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens of Baltimore will continue its holiday poinsettia show today. The show includes 15 varieties, with more than 1,000 plants, and poinsettias will be available for sale in the conservatory's north pavilion. The free show will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays through Jan. 1. Information: 410-396-0180.

A reception will be held Wednesday at the Peabody Conservatory in honor of the late Mary C. Walker, who upon her death donated $800,000 to the institution where she studied and worked for most of her life. The bulk of Walker's gift - $600,000 - is being designated for undergraduate scholarships, the Conservatory announced recently. The remaining $200,000 will be split evenly between the alumni fund and the archives. Walker was a granddaughter of a man who made his fortune in the 19 t h century in the meatpacking business.

As their habitats in the Andes mountains in South America have disappeared, some of the last specimens of rare cool-growing orchids are preserved at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.The conservatory recently opened to the public its collection of 2,800 Masdevallia and Dracula orchids, varieties that thrive in cool climates -- 70 degrees in the daytime and 50 degrees at night.Most of the orchids on display no longer exist in their native habitats, which include snowy mountainsides at 14,000 feet.

Jeffrey Sharkey, the No. 2 administrator at the Cleveland Institute of Music, has been named to the No. 1 post at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. The Delaware-born Sharkey will start work as Peabody director Oct. 1, succeeding Robert Sirota. Sirota resigned last June to become president of the Manhattan School of Music, where Sharkey earned his undergraduate degree. "Bob Sirota left the school in really good shape," Mark Katz, a Peabody faculty member who served on the search committee for a new director, said yesterday.

Michael Bromery sat alone, engulfed in a forest of green, alternately playing a Japanese melody called "Esaka" on his acoustic guitar and self-made bamboo flute against the sound of mini-waterfalls. "People come here to relax and for peace of mind," he said, referring to The Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens of Baltimore, which is hosting its annual Flower Show, a large display of brightly colored tulips and snow-white lilies, through Sunday. There are innumerable reasons why people find pleasure at the conservatory, which was built nearly 120 years ago, as illustrated yesterday by individuals, couples and families who leisurely made their way past thousands of plants and flowers.

The Peabody Court Hotel, the elegant Mount Vernon inn that is home to the celebrated Conservatory restaurant, has lost its chef in what might be called "the Great Squab Squabble."Michael Gettier, under whom the Conservatory became one of only two restaurants in Baltimore to earn a four-diamond rating from the American Automobile Association, was one of a half-dozen top managers who either quit or were fired in a bitter upheaval at the luxury hotel and restaurant last week.Mr. Gettier says the hotel's new management company told him the restaurant would switch from classic French cuisine to "midlevel" American cooking within two or three weeks.

SINGAPORE -- Singapore's latest frontier lies in a maze of small offices in a nondescript building. The walls mostly bear nothing, and the furniture is so new the desks almost sparkle in the harsh glare of fluorescent lighting. It's in this spare setting that a grand production is in the works. In just three months, the Singapore Conservatory of Music will be born -- and this will be its home. Building a conservatory is no insignificant endeavor by any means. But in this tiny Southeast Asian country that long has been regarded as little more than a strict city-state and economic titan in the region, the conservatory is viewed as more than just a school.

NEW YORK - Say that there happens to be this internationally famous campus in the city about which most New Yorkers are clueless. That it attracts doctoral students from all over the world, that it sends out scientists on exploratory missions across the planet and helps anchor global research on genomics, conservation and endangered species. And say that it happens to be in the Bronx. And that it's about to get a new $100 million state-of-the-art focal point to house one of the world's greatest collections of its kind.

Lynn Taylor Hebden, a Baltimore-born lyric soprano who headed the Peabody Preparatory Department for more than two decades and was also a member of the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory, died Sunday from complications of breast cancer at her Roland Park home. She was 84. "I always sought her advice and historical perspective. She always was very interested and wanted to know how people on the faculty she had known were doing," said Carolee Stewart, the preparatory school's dean.

Kate Blom's glamorous old house is 125 years old this year and, not surprisingly, it is badly in need of repairs. The wood is rotting around the windows, the doors need replacing, the chimney brick work needs re-pointing and the floor in one room is worn and crumbling. So she is throwing a kind of "work party" this week, hoping her guests will pitch in and take on a job that's too big for just one woman. Kate Blom's house is the Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens in Druid Hill Park, the last of five Victorian glass houses that once graced Baltimore's parks and offered peaceful respite to the city's residents.

Betty G. Hocker, a retired Baltimore opera singer and composer who wrote the "Fort McHenry March" at the time of the nation's bicentennial, died Saturday of complications from dementia at Stella Maris Hospice. The longtime Roland Park resident was 101. The daughter of a businessman and a homemaker, Sara Elizabeth "Betty" Gumpper was born into a musical family in Butler, Pa. Her father played the banjo and piano and had a small band, while her mother also played the piano and sang.

In terms of talent, glamour and wide appeal, few opera singers today rank as high as mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. No wonder there's quite a buzz at the Peabody Conservatory, where Graves will join the voice faculty in the fall. People are still talking about a master class that Graves gave at the conservatory last September. "She didn't know she was auditioning," said Phyllis Bryn-Julson, the distinguished soprano who chairs the voice department. "It was a phenomenal day for the students.

Mary C. Walker, a retired Peabody Institute director of alumni relations who had been a special assistant to the school's director, died of cardiovascular disease Dec. 22 at the Edenwald Retirement Community. She was 100. Her friends at the music school often said that the C in her name stood for Conservatory, not her middle name, Catherine. Born in Baltimore, she was the daughter of William W. Walker and Mary Catherine Shafer Walker. Her mother's family had a pork packing business near the Lexington Market.

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.

When the noted architect Edward Durrell Stone designed student housing for Baltimore's Peabody Institute in the late 1960s, he stated that his design would transform the urban campus into "an almost private world" and that students and teachers would not have to venture into the surrounding neighborhood. By raising the dormitory towers on a terrace high above the street, Stone said, the effect would be "to remove the buildings a little from the city." That objective was considered not only desirable but necessary in 1969, when Baltimore was still reeling from the riots triggered by the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. But it hurt the historic Mount Vernon area around Peabody, America's first conservatory of music, because it took people off the streets.

Druid Hill Park visitors will stroll through a balmy climate among banana trees, vanilla vines and pots of jasmine when its greenhouses reopen, freshly re-stocked with the flora of the desert, tropics and Mediterranean climates following an ambitious $3.5 million refurbishment of the park's Conservatory, beginning this month.The Conservatory consists of the park's Palm House, a fancy Victorian landmark that faces Auchentoroly Terrace, three adjoining greenhouses built in 1892 and exterior gardens.

"Mr. Beverage" is back at the Midtown. Nathan Beveridge, who owned the Midtown Yacht Club in Mount Vernon from 1998 to 2005, is back at the helm, the interim operators having jumped ship. And that's the last of the nautical references, because the Midtown Yacht Club, as Erik Maza reported on Midnight Sun, is now Midtown BBQ and Brew . You can just call it "Midtown," Beveridge says, as many folks always did anyway. In the 1990s, Beveridge earned a following, along with, inevitably, the "Mr. Beverage" nickname, at the bygone Conservatory, high atop the Peabody Court Hotel, where the views of Mount Vernon were giddy.