Maestro

PRESIDENT BUSH'S early endorsement of a fifth term for Alan Greenspan - just as the 77-year-old Federal Reserve Board chairman was undergoing successful surgery Tuesday for an enlarged prostrate - was an encouraging tonic for Wall Street. And it could not have been intended otherwise. Just two months ago, there was inside-the-Beltway buzz about tensions between the president and Mr. Greenspan, perhaps even a repeat of the clash between the president's father and the Fed chief a decade ago. After all, Mr. Greenspan had the honesty to challenge Mr. Bush's reckless drive for more tax cuts, which already are bringing the return of massive federal budget deficits.

This clip from last month's Head 2 Head Transmodern Festival is mostly typical Dan Deacon live fare — sped-up, indistinguishable vocals, sweaty kids participating in a dance-off, enough energy to make a bull's heart stop. But it's also sweet in an unexpected way: Deacon, perhaps our city's most famous connection to Francis Ford Coppola , debuts a new song (which momentarily sounded like an AT&T ad) for his girlfriend Stefani. When it's over, he explains he began writing the song on her last birthday but never finished until a couple days ago. A song that took a year to write?

This clip from last month's Head 2 Head Transmodern Festival is mostly typical Dan Deacon live fare — sped-up, indistinguishable vocals, sweaty kids participating in a dance-off, enough energy to make a bull's heart stop. But it's also sweet in an unexpected way: Deacon, perhaps our city's most famous connection to Francis Ford Coppola , debuts a new song (which momentarily sounded like an AT&T ad) for his girlfriend Stefani. When it's over, he explains he began writing the song on her last birthday but never finished until a couple days ago. A song that took a year to write?

A couple of years ago, Moby was at the MTV Music Awards when he had a career-changing epiphany. "I was sitting between Christina Aguilera and Ludacris, and I had this moment where I just started thinking to myself, 'What the hell am I doing here?' " he said. "Nothing against Ludacris and Christina Aguilera, but it's not a world I want to have anything to do with." At the time, Moby was very much a part of that world. A longtime staple on the dance music scene, Moby, who performs at Rams Head Live tonight, became an international pop star seemingly overnight with his 1999 effort "Play."

Tonight, maestro David Zinman will be conducting a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where he spends his summers teaching and leading musical ensembles. The man who led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is now 71, and he is as busy as ever. His bags are always packed and ready to go. In his 13 years with the BSO, he became known for championing American music, much of it commissioned by the Baltimore ensemble. Though he says he spends 30 to 40 days a year at his home in Cape May, N.J., he also lives four months in Zurich, Switzerland, where he leads the Tonhalle Orchestra and is recording a complete series of the Gustav Mahler symphonies.

Two seasons ago, a young American named Alan Gilbert stepped onto the Baltimore Symphony podium as a last-minute substitution for an indisposed guest conductor.Gilbert gave a distinguished account of his abilities on that occasion, and he has returned to the Meyerhoff Hall - this time as the scheduled guest conductor.His program includes Beethoven's ever-popular Fifth Symphony and two of the composer's less familiar works, the Mass in C major and the Choral Fantasy for piano, orchestra and chorus.

Gilbert Levine, a Brooklyn-born orchestra conductor, is known in some circles as "the pope's maestro."After being appointed conductor of the Krakow Philharmonic in 1987, when Poland was still under Communist rule, Mr. Levine became acquainted with Pope John Paul II, who was archbishop of that city before being named pope in 1978. "He calls me 'Our maestro from Krakow,' " Mr. Levine said. Since then, Mr. Levine -- who is Jewish -- has been involved in several concerts with the pope, including last year's "Papal Concert to Commemorate the Holocaust."

THE MAESTRO MYTH.Norman Lebrecht.Birch Lane Press.379 pages. $22.50.Books about musical conductors -- not counting how-to manuals -- tend either to kowtow or to muckrake. (The late Elliott Galkin's voluminous "History," published in 1989, managed to do all three, but even it suffered from errata.) "The Maestro Myth" muckrakes, with a vengeance and no little bravado. But the author, a British journalist of middle years, may have seen too many Hollywood westerns.In a showdown with alleged rustlers, hustlers, robbers and varmints belonging to a worldwide podium cartel, Norman Lebrecht is quick to draw but has a lousy aim. He shoots off so many of his own toes that outrage is maimed; he falls time and again on his face, sparing the enemy any need to load, much less to return his fire.

Anyone foolish enough to buy into the scurrilous notion that "Those who can't, teach" received his comeuppance at last weekend's concerts given by the Annapolis Symphony.On the podium was David Effron, 59, the maestro from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.Effron, who has become one of the country's foremost maestros of academia during his 21-year stint at Eastman, appeared as the second entrant in this year's ASO conductor's derby.He conducted a diverse program that included the propulsive modernism of Joseph Schwantner's "A Sudden Rainbow," the songful purity of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and the sprawling romanticism of Sergei Rachmaninoff's 2nd Symphony.

Walter Proost, the 42-year-old Belgian maestro who will guest-conduct the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra this weekend, may be unfamiliar to most Americans, but he has certainly been turning heads in Europe lately.Being the first non-Italian ever engaged as the permanent conductor of an Italian orchestra may not sound like much on this side of the Atlantic, but in Italy, where parochial political hacks have had a stranglehold on the arts for generations, his appointment was a real eyebrow-raiser.

It seems like an odd marriage: Mario, with his plumber's hat, goomba-stomping shoes and delightfully clunky theme music, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, with their suit tails, bow ties and classical repertoire. But the two will come together Friday when the BSO performs a night of music from popular video games. Called PLAY! A Video Game Symphony, the concert features theme songs from games such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy and others.

Zeal Optics makes great sunglasses. But the Tensai model ($130) isn't meant for wide, open faces. Like all Zeal sunglasses, these are perfect for fly fishermen, who require superior contrast and depth perception, and bikers and runners, who need shades that won't slip off when the sweat pours out. Nonslip nose and temple pads keep their grip, and the lightweight frames seem to disappear. Rather than the Tensai model, we're guessing most medium-size faces would be happier with Zeal's Maestro model at the same price - Outside magazine's 2006 Gear of the Year winner.

The most surprising thing about last weekend's concerts by the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, the second pair of subscription offerings this season, was the written program's assertion that these were the first-ever ASO performances of Antonin Dvorak's 7th Symphony. Dvorak is one of those "second line" composers who wasn't second line in the least. Melody flowed from his pen in inexhaustible quantities as he composed in an expansive, emotionally compelling voice inspired by the Czech idioms that infused his works.

Tonight, maestro David Zinman will be conducting a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where he spends his summers teaching and leading musical ensembles. The man who led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is now 71, and he is as busy as ever. His bags are always packed and ready to go. In his 13 years with the BSO, he became known for championing American music, much of it commissioned by the Baltimore ensemble. Though he says he spends 30 to 40 days a year at his home in Cape May, N.J., he also lives four months in Zurich, Switzerland, where he leads the Tonhalle Orchestra and is recording a complete series of the Gustav Mahler symphonies.

Call him The Defier. Gian Carlo Menotti defied critics, producers, boards of directors, contemporary tastes, the odds. The affable and wonderfully opinionated Italian-born composer, who died Thursday at 95, was a 19th-century man working in the 20th, writing the music he felt, in a style Verdi and Puccini would have thoroughly understood. And he was something of a genius at reaching the public with his work, especially his operas. Starting in 1947, with a double bill of a comedy, The Telephone, and a melodrama, The Medium, he took opera into traditional Broadway theaters and enjoyed unprecedented, and so far unequaled, triumphs there.

Yuri Temirkanov threw a dinner party for about 100 of his closest friends Tuesday night -- the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and some of its administrative staff, past and present. It was Temirkanov's parting gift to an ensemble he has led with remarkable distinction since 2000. BSO Yuri Temirkanov leads the orchestra for the last times as music director at 8 p.m. today and tomorrow and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St.; 8 p.m. Saturday at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda.

Josef Gingold knows more about the violin than any man alive. He's the one who introduced the 13-year-old Itzhak Perlman to chamber music, he's the teacher of Joshua Bell and he's the guy who suggested to a 14-year-old violin wunderkind, wise guy and would-be pool shark named Pinchas Zukerman that he might also look into the viola. To put it in a staccato stroke: Gingold's the maestro behind many bows -- he's the greatest violin teacher in the world."Look, my dear, my whole life is centered around that little cheese box of ours," Gingold says when he's asked why -- after two strokes and at the age of 82 -- he continues to teach more than 20 students each year at Indiana University.

The opening concert of the Annapolis Symphony's 45th anniversary season presented at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts afforded a third opportunity to assess the artistry of Jose-Luis Novo, the orchestra's newly hired conductor. There was his audition concert last fall, an oddly conceived salute to Gypsy influences in music celebrated in works by Ravel, Falla, Kodaly and Johann Strauss. Then, last May, Schubert's Unfinished and Dvorak's New World symphonies were offered at Novo's victory lap concert celebrating his ascension to the ASO post.

VIENNA, Austria -- The flowers said it all. As Yuri Temirkanov returned to the stage for a traditional solo bow after conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's European tour-ending concert Saturday night at Vienna's gilded Konzerthaus, something unconventional happened. A large bouquet of flowers worked its way from the back of the orchestra toward him - a percussionist handed it to a wind player who handed it to a string player who handed it to the startled music director. The token of appreciation and affection from the ensemble capped Temirkanov's third and final international tour with the BSO. He steps down as music director in June, after six years.

The opening concert of the Annapolis Symphony's 45th anniversary season presented at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts afforded a third opportunity to assess the artistry of Jose-Luis Novo, the orchestra's newly hired conductor. There was his audition concert last fall, an oddly conceived salute to Gypsy influences in music celebrated in works by Ravel, Falla, Kodaly and Johann Strauss. Then, last May, Schubert's Unfinished and Dvorak's New World symphonies were offered at Novo's victory lap concert celebrating his ascension to the ASO post.