Marin Alsop

If it has a good beat, you can count on Marin Alsop to conduct it with infectious energy. That point is being driven home by her latest program with the Baltimore Symphony, which has one more local performance before the orchestra takes it to Carnegie Hall on Monday. To start this sampling of 20th and 21st century repertoire, there is the pulsating “Shaker Loops,” an early-1980s classic of minimalism for string orchestra by John Adams. To close, Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 (the revised version of 1947)

Violinist Ellen Pendleton Troyer has struggled for years with the constraints of wearing evening attire for physical, sometimes-strenuous performances. And she considers herself luckier than her male counterparts, who have a stricter dress code of bow ties and evening jackets adorned with tails. "Our issues with the dress stem from a functionality standpoint," said Troyer, who plays first violin with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. "What we do is quite physical. There is a lot of sweating under the hot lights.

It's still late-summer, but classical musicians can hardly wait to get back into the concert hall for the 2011-2012 season. One of the first to return is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra . Conductor Marin Alsop leads a Gala Celebration concert Sept. 10 at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall that features a Baltimore native, violinist Hilary Hahn , playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. This program also includes a BSO-commissioned piece, David T. Little's Baltimore-themed "Charm," reinforcing Alsop's commitment to new music.

The good news about the Spring For Music festival at Carnegie Hall is that it chooses American orchestras of all sizes to bring off-the-beaten-path programs to the nation's premier classical music showplace, and charges only $25 a seat. The bad news is that there isn't enough funding to keep the festival going past next spring. The good news is that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra got to open the penultimate festival Monday night, and do so with considerable flair, delivering a particularly impressive performance of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 led by music director Marin Alsop.

There's a light and dark theme running through the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's 2013-2014 season, which includes works dealing with great loss, as well as great compassion. “Sometimes through tragedy, whether a world war or a personal loss, the beauty of humanity comes out in art,” said BSO music director Marin Alsop. “Great art brings us together in a very authentic and pure way.”    The season will feature Benjamin Britten's large-scale, profoundly moving “War Requiem” from 1962, written for the reconsecration of England's Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in 1940 by bombing.

Maryland has museums devoted to African Americans, artists, war veterans and sports legends. Starting this spring, it will have a center devoted to more than half the state's adult population: women. When the Maryland Women's Heritage Center and Museum opens in downtown Baltimore, planners say, it will be the first of its kind in the nation - a community forum that will recognize stories of achievement by Maryland women - from Harriet Tubman to Rachel Carson to Marin Alsop.

Marin Alsop made history with her appointment as the 12th music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her inaugural concerts in September, she became the first woman to head a major American orchestra. In 2005, Alsop was named a MacArthur Fellow, the first and only conductor to receive this prestigious American award. The three books that most influenced her: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "The Magic Mountain" By Thomas Mann (Everyman's Library $26) His writing is so symphonic in structure and content and its ambiguities allow for immense interpretive license.

Though two Baltimore-based musical groups lost in the 52nd annual Grammy Awards Sunday, Marin Alsop, conductor for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, did come away a winner. The BSO's recording of Leonard Bernstein's epic, controversial music-theater piece "Mass" was a nominee for Best Classical Album, a category won by the San Francisco Symphony. Alsop conducted Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto on a London Philharmonic recording that was named Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

If you're traveling about the country during the next few weeks, don't be surprised if you bump into a major player from Baltimore's cultural stage: Marin Alsop, music director-to-be of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She's conducting from coast-to-coast, starting tonight, when she leads the New York Philharmonic in a free concert on the Great Lawn of Central Park. Despite the heat wave, this may turn out to be one of the cooler spots in Manhattan. Alsop has programmed a fun piece by John Adams, The Chairman Dances, derived from his opera Nixon in China, and Beethoven's evergreen Symphony No. 5. In between will be Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, with Leila Josefowicz, a fast-rising young talent on today's scene, as soloist.

I am more of a colleague than a maestro," says Marin Alsop. That may help to explain her remarkable success since winning the estimable Koussevitzky Conducting Prize in 1989 at the Tanglewood Music Center, where Leonard Bernstein had been her mentor. Alsop went on to be a guest on the podiums of one major orchestra after another in this country and abroad, and was named music director of the Colorado Symphony in 1993. Next season, she becomes principal conductor of England's oldest orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony.

NEW YORK -- Carnegie Hall put out the purple Monday night to welcome the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for the opening of Spring For Music, a week-long festival showcasing American orchestras playing adventurous programs. Ravens-colored cloths adorned the seat backs of the musicians' chairs and the conductor's podium; more cloths were handed out to audience members to wave on cue in a salute to Baltimore. That cue came before the music started when an announcer from local radio station  WQXR interviewed the BSO's high-profile booster, Gov. Martin O'Malley, onstage.

If it has a good beat, you can count on Marin Alsop to conduct it with infectious energy. That point is being driven home by her latest program with the Baltimore Symphony, which has one more local performance before the orchestra takes it to Carnegie Hall on Monday. To start this sampling of 20th and 21st century repertoire, there is the pulsating “Shaker Loops,” an early-1980s classic of minimalism for string orchestra by John Adams. To close, Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 (the revised version of 1947)

On Friday night, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's gave, note for note, one of the most thoroughly absorbing and emotionally powerful performances of an all-Russian program since the glory days of all-Russian programs with former music director Yuri Temirkanov. Although non-Russians can certainly shine in music from that country, as we have witnessed locally in some hot BSO concerts led by Marin Alsop, Juanjo Mena and others, Russians do tend to touch some deeper nerve. Making his BSO debut, Moscow-born conductor Dima Slobodeniouk had the orchestra sounding all fired up at Meyerhoff Hall in some pretty tough repertoire that included the long, draining Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905,” by Shostakovich.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which has slipped back into deficit territory partly because of pension fund obligations, has planned a concert to do something about that. The program has what should be a big draw -- music by celebrated film composer John Williams. Proceeds will benefit the BSO musicians' pension fund, and since Williams is donating his services, that gives those proceeds all the more potential. Williams, who has earned five Oscars and nearly 10 times that many nominations, will lead the BSO in selections from his scores for such hits as "Star Wars" and "E.T," not to mention the sagas of "Indiana Jones" and "Harry Potter.

There's a light and dark theme running through the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's 2013-2014 season, which includes works dealing with great loss, as well as great compassion. “Sometimes through tragedy, whether a world war or a personal loss, the beauty of humanity comes out in art,” said BSO music director Marin Alsop. “Great art brings us together in a very authentic and pure way.”    The season will feature Benjamin Britten's large-scale, profoundly moving “War Requiem” from 1962, written for the reconsecration of England's Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in 1940 by bombing.

Leonard Bernstein, the brilliant American conductor and composer, did not just wear his heart on his sleeve. All his worries were clearly exposed as well. This comes through in many of his compositions, where there's a palpable sense of struggle - between light and dark, conviction and doubt, tonality and dissonance. His Symphony No. 3, the "Kaddish," composed in 1963 and dedicated to the "beloved memory" of John F. Kennedy, is a major case in point. Another is "Mass," the astounding theater piece Bernstein wrote for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971.

It is possible to quibble with the idea of cramming three blockbuster works into a single program, but the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra carries it off. Ravel's "Bolero," that brilliant study in rhythmic and melodic reiteration, not to mention crescendo, is more likely to serve as a concert finale than a curtain-raiser for Tchaikovsky's barnstorming Piano Concerto No. 1. But here they are, back to back. And after two of classical music's greatest hits, why not one more? Well, at least one of classical music's greatest minutes — the introductory passage of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," now more commonly identified as the theme from the sci-fi classic "2001.

Another glass ceiling can be heard breaking today as Marin Alsop becomes the first woman to conduct an entire program with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, one of Europe's greatest ensembles. That sound will be carried live over the Internet, thanks to a Webcast. Audio of the program - Piano Concerto No. 1, Suite from The Bolt, and Jazz Suite No. 2 by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich - will be available for download later. Online A live Webcast of Marin Alsop's all-Shostakovich program with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam will be available online at 2:30 p.m. via rcolive.

Dennis C. Kain, longtime Baltimore Symphony Orchestra principal timpanist, whose career spanned more than four decades, died Saturday of colon cancer at his Hamilton home. He was 73. "Dennis was not only a wonderful musician and timpanist, but also a beloved member of the BSO family," said Marin Alsop, the orchestra's music director. "His love of music and his fellow musicians always shone through, and he tackled life and music with a positive, open and inspiring attitude," said Ms. Alsop.

Baltimore figures substantially in "Arts and the Mind," a two-hour documentary airing on PBS stations around the country. There is a good amount of airtime for OrchKids, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's ambitious music education program launched by music director Marin Alsop and now offered in four inner-city schools. Also getting attention is Dr. Charles Limb, the surgeon and neuroscientist (not to mention jazz sax player) at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His studies into the creative process include putting a hip-hop performer under a brain scanner.