Mozart

Fans of 17th- and 18th-century music will find much to consider in the days ahead, including the U.S. premiere of a baroque opera by Cavalli and, this weekend, a rare performance of the original version of Mozart's Idomeneo. It was with Idomeneo that Mozart first revealed just how great an opera composer he would become. This tale of love, duty, sacrifice and monsters in post-Trojan War Crete contains some of his most compelling and vividly orchestrated music. Just before the 1781 premiere in Munich, Mozart made a lot of cuts to the opera, and it is this self-edited version of the score that will be performed in concert form by Opera Lafayette at the Clarice Smith Center in College Park.

Annapolis Opera's fully staged production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts was a success on all counts. There were very few empty seats on Sunday, and I'm told a near-capacity and equally enthusiastic audience enjoyed the Friday night performance. Based on a 1784 Beaumarchais play that debuted in Paris, Mozart's opera premiered in Vienna in 1786 with his brilliant score set to the Italian libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte to unify drama and music with themes of love, vengeance and forgiveness.

Last night's inaugural all-Mozart "Summerfest" concert featured Maestro David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the height of their respective powers, with the composer and the audience the clear beneficiaries.Zinman's view of Mozart is similar in certain respects to many of his contemporaries. He eschews the romanticized approach of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in favor of a lean orchestral sound, fleet tempos and crisp attacks. What sets Zinman apart is that he executes this approach with an enthusiasm and musicality that few today can equal.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's infrequent presentations of opera-in-concert over the past decade have included a repertoire well off the beaten path — Tchaikovsky's "Iolanta" in 2000 and Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle" in 2005. This weekend, the focus is very familiar, very popular fare: Mozart's "The Magic Flute. " "It is the first opera I ever heard when I was a kid," said BSO music director Marin Alsop. "My dad told me the story and all about the secret codes, how the number 3 is important.

The Baltimore Choral Arts Society attempted to scale the Everest that is the genius of Mozart Saturday night by presenting two of the composer's masterworks. The fact that the Violin Concerto No. 5 and the great C Minor Mass never fulfilled Mozart's splendor may say more about how difficult this music is than the inadequacies of the performances at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.The Violin Concerto No. 5 set the tone for the evening. The orchestra was infused with a healthy dose of Baltimore Symphony players, giving it a more mature sound.

The slow movement of Mozart's Concerto No. 18 in B flat (K.456) is an extraordinary affair: a set of variations in G minor that are colored with the most delicate of emotions, a kind of gentle melancholy that much resembles Barbarina's aria in "The Marriage of Figaro."In his concert last night with the Baltimore Symphony and music director David Zinman in Meyerhoff Hall, pianist Christian Zacharias performed that movement about as beautifully as one can, with a subtlety of inflection and imaginative dynamic shading that brought to mind a superb soprano.

Poor Mozart. Everybody who saw the movie knows genius went unrewarded, that the composer of "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute" lived hand to mouth and died a pauper.In fact, say William Baumol, an economist at New York University, and Hilda Baumol, an economics consultant in New York, everybody got it wrong.In a paper written for the Mozart Bicentennial Symposium at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, the husband-wife team calculates that Mozart's income in the last decade of his life was thoroughly middle class by 1990s standards -- a remarkable achievement for a time in which most wage earners lived at the raw edge of subsistence.

Richard Goode took a sabbatical last year, and the fruits of that break in his schedule should be apparent when he performs Mozart's "Piano Concerto No. 27 (K.595)" this week in Meyerhoff Hall with David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.Because it is Mozart's final concerto and was among the last major works he completed before his death, Goode says, it's usually interpreted as a death-haunted valediction to a genre the composer had made his own as he had no other."But it is not as tragic as some of Mozart's earlier piano concertos," Goode says in a telephone interview.

Mozart -- the birthday boy who keeps on giving. For the better part of a year, musicians the world over have been making an even bigger deal of him than usual. The 250th anniversary of his birth has triggered a flood of performances, fresh reminders that Mozart's genius still eclipses everybody else who has ever composed music. For its final contribution to the Mozart year, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is focusing this week on the close of his creative life, those amazing months of 1791 when he produced one impossibly perfect and perfectly beautiful work after another.

This week, why not take a chance on Mozart? Literally. During its "Many Moods of Mozart" program on Saturday, the Concert Artists of Baltimore will take time out for a perfectly legal crap game. It's all part of "Musikalisches Wurfelspiel" -- "A Musical Dice Game" -- devised by Mozart in 1787 as an arbitrary way of coming up with a minuet. The roll of the dice determines which pre-composed musical phrases are put together to form a complete composition. Other playful sides of Mozart will be explored as well, through excerpts from "The Marriage of Figaro," "The Magic Flute," the "Turkish" Violin Concerto and "Paris" Symphony.

Mozart never finished "Zaide," a music-theater piece with spoken dialogue. What has come down to us is a colorful, rather dark story about a sultan named Soliman, who loves his slave Zaide, who loves fellow slave Gomatz. With the help of Allazim, a high-ranking slave, Zaide and Gomatz escape, only to be captured and threatened with death. At that point, the story ends. Wolf Trap Opera's presentation allows the audience to vote at intermission for one of three possibilities — happy, happier and downer.

Typically, when the character of Papageno the bird-catcher makes his entrance in Mozart's beloved opera "The Magic Flute," he's carrying a cage and, often, sporting a few feathers himself. When he appears in Opera Vivente's new production of the work, Papageno's most avian feature will be the word on his shirt — "Orioles." And don't be surprised if he's hoisting a Natty Boh. This isn't your father's "Magic Flute," hon. During the company's 12 seasons, John Bowen, founding general director of Opera Vivente, has frequently spiced and updated familiar works, which are always performed in English.

All orchestras need to get back to their roots periodically, putting aside the big-gun Tchaikovsky and Mahler works and exploring the more intimately scaled world of Haydn. He was, after all, the "father of the symphony," the composer who created the mold and filled it more than 100 times. Haydn's symphonic works aren't played as regularly as they should be around here, which is one reason why the latest Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program is well worth catching. Another reason is that French conductor Louis Langr?

This week's Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program finds Marin Alsop conducting works by the original American musical maverick, Charles Ives, and two composers she is not automatically associated with - Mozart and Saint-Saens. The latter will be represented by his popular Symphony No. 3, nicknamed "Organ," for its thunderous use of that instrument in the finale. It's a sure-fire score that combines French refinement with thematic ingenuity and brilliant tone colors. The Mozart item is his Symphony No. 29, which strikes a perfect balance between elegance and propulsion.

In its English offering this week of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," Opera AACC calls upon the talents of Anne Arundel Community College faculty members, Maryland-based singers and 15 students from county elementary, middle and high schools. The shows, including today's at 3 p.m., will be presented at AACC's Pascal Center for the Performing Arts. James Harp, the artistic administrator of the Baltimore Opera, is the stage director of AACC's production, and Anna Binneweg, AACC's music director, is music director and conductor.

Bad guys in the movies and on TV might spill more blood and use fouler language, but they've still got nothing on Don Giovanni, the original amoral machine who propels one of the greatest operas in the repertoire. Mozart's immortalization of the irresistible antihero, as contemptuous of heaven's judgment as of hell's, has been given a stylish update by Opera Vivente. This entertaining Don Giovanni is set in what appears to be 1940s or '50s America, a transition that works neatly enough.

The melodies of Mozart can no longer be contained within the music room at Spring Garden Elementary. Since early November, they've grabbed the attention of the whole school.In the cafeteria, "A Little Night Music" dances among students on break for lunch. In art class, it might be "The Marriage of Figaro" that accompanies creative work time.Mozart is taken home, too, on cassette tapes with study copies of the words to his operas. Tapes of Mozart are going like hot cakes from a special lending library in the school media center.

This week's Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program finds Marin Alsop conducting works by the original American musical maverick, Charles Ives, and two composers she is not automatically associated with - Mozart and Saint-Saens. The latter will be represented by his popular Symphony No. 3, nicknamed "Organ," for its thunderous use of that instrument in the finale. It's a sure-fire score that combines French refinement with thematic ingenuity and brilliant tone colors. The Mozart item is his Symphony No. 29, which strikes a perfect balance between elegance and propulsion.

With energy and passion, the Anne Arundel Community College Orchestra offered a spring concert that lived up to its title, "Finale With Fire!" Much of the credit has to go to Anna Binneweg, who became the AACC Orchestra's director and conductor and a teacher in fall 2006. Since then, the ensemble has nearly doubled in size to 64. A quarter of the musicians remain from 2006, indicating membership stability. Most of the horn section remains intact, along with flutes and trumpets and two trombonists, and there are also at least five of the 2006 violinists.

The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, video game theme music and Leon Fleisher -- not exactly your typical Baltimore Symphony Orchestra summer season. On the classical side of the eclectic 2008 lineup, the BSO will celebrate the 80th birthday of Fleisher, one of the country's most gifted and respected musicians, with an all-Mozart program that will showcase both his pianistic and conducting skills. He'll lead the orchestra in Symphony No. 35 and No. 40 and, from the keyboard, Piano Concerto No. 12. Performances are July 24 at the Music Center at Strathmore and July 25 at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.