Music Director

Quick quiz: Name a long-established, full-sized professional orchestra in Maryland and its female music director known for her energetic style and championing of contemporary American repertoire - besides the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop. If you haven't been to Hagerstown lately, you might have trouble coming up with the answers. That's where the Maryland Symphony Orchestra has been going strong for 25 years, and where Elizabeth Schulze - the ensemble's second music director and first female conductor - has been on the podium for eight.

An impending musical disaster causing reported "hyper-ventilating among musicians" was turned into triumph at a May 20 concert, two weeks after ailing Londontowne Symphony conductor Brenda Leach needed a fill-in. Anna Binneweg, director and conductor of the Anne Arundel Community College Orchestra, agreed to serve as cover conductor, quickly securing missing rental scores to conduct initial rehearsals. LSO president Kathy Solano said she was "impressed at how well prepared she was for her first rehearsal with us."

Next season promises to be a good one for contemporary American music in Baltimore. With Marin Alsop as its new music director, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will perform nearly a dozen pieces by living American composers, as well as 20th-century masterworks by Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. But local enthusiasts of new and recent American works need not wait for Alsop's arrival to hear the indigenous music of our time. At 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at Jim Rouse Theatre, music director Jason Love and the Columbia Orchestra will close out their season with "A New World," a program featuring music by three Americans and one famous European visitor.

The African-American experience in the 20th century and Japanese robotics of the 21st; starry guest artists at the National Symphony Orchestra and a salute to its outgoing music director; a festival of a cappella music and a concert series of veteran Broadway singers - that's just some of what's in store for the Kennedy Center's 2007-2008 season. "It's sure to be a great and diverse season," the center's president, Michael Kaiser, said yesterday. His announcement of the lineup was preceded by a trumpet-playing robot from Japan, heralding a two-week festival next February celebrating Japanese "culture and hyperculture."

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will return to the national airwaves for the first time in nearly a decade with a new series on XM satellite radio beginning Sept. 27, when Marin Alsop's first concert as music director will be broadcast live from the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. XM, which has 8 million subscribers, will air seven more concerts between January and June 2008, all of them recorded in performances at the BSO's primary venue, Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, and conducted by Alsop.

Few Baltimoreans -- with such significant exceptions as H.L. Mencken, Cal Ripken and John Waters -- achieve fame, celebrity and success without leaving town.Consider this short list of those who found fame by departing: Oprah, Barry Levinson, Eubie Blake, Frederick Douglass, Babe Ruth, Billie Holliday, Wallis Warfield Simpson, Cab Calloway, Jada Pinkett, Frank Zappa, Philip Glass and Spiro Agnew.It's time to rack up another name: David Zinman, former music director of the Baltimore Symphony, who left at the end of the 1997-98 season.

Musical chairsFORTUNATELY, the eminent Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov signed on as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra through the 2002-2003 season. That makes Baltimore a winner in the great conductor shuffle going on.Seiji Ozawa, the 63-year-old who has been music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 26 years, is quitting as of August 2002 to become music director of the Vienna State Opera.The nimble Japanese conductor who dances on the podium with pixie charm will be missed by many who believe he burnished that orchestra into the nation's greatest.

Lend a tenor, a few soprano and baritone voices to J. Ernest Green, and he'll transform them into a big, beautiful choral sound.He has been doing that with the Annapolis Chorale since coming to direct it in 1985. What was then a 70-voice chorale is now 145 voices, performing Renaissance to contemporary music during its regular season, and pop classics at its summer outdoor concerts.And he has been doing that with Baltimore's Young Victorian Theatre Company since 1985, when he became music director of the operetta company, which specializes in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Evidence that good things sometimes happen to good people will arrive this evening when the Syracuse (N.Y.) Symphony names Daniel Hege as its sixth music director, effective at the beginning of next season.The 33-year-old Hege, the Baltimore Symphony's associate music director, has been on the BSO's conducting staff since the beginning of the 1996-1997 season.He has won the respect, admiration and affection of the orchestra's musicians for his intelligence, talent, musical integrity and personal decency -- a combination of qualities generally considered rare in any human being, rarer still in a conductor.

This is the week that Baltimore music lovers really get to say goodbye to David Zinman.The program the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its former music director perform in Meyerhoff Symphony Hall this week and take to New York's Carnegie Hall on Monday evening represents Zinman's 13-year tenure better than any of the high-gloss celebrations that marked his final year on the job last season.It includes three things Zinman does spectacularly well: interpret the music of Elgar (his "Cockaigne Overture" opens the program)

As she was setting love poems from different eras to music, Paula Diesel Farina kept one thing in mind: Never end a concert on a mournful note. A music teacher, singer and amateur composer, Farina had written music for a pair of contrasting pieces of poetry, one about first love and the other about the torment love can bring. "In the second one, 'Love is a Sickness,' the left hand plays this thumping heartbeat that you desperately wish would stop," she said, referring to the elegiac piano accompaniment.

Marin Alsop, who became the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's 12th music director in September 2007, will remain in that post until 2015 under the terms of a five-year contract announced Thursday. That contract will begin when her initial three-year deal ends in September 2010. "I'm very, very happy about it," Alsop said. So is the orchestra. News of the contract "was greeted warmly," said Laurie Sokoloff, head of the players committee. Though Alsop's appointment as music director famously triggered opposition from BSO musicians displeased with the orchestra's previous management and the way the search was conducted, it dissipated quickly.

Jonathan Carney puts his whole body into each phrase of music, making it impossible to miss him when he's playing violin from the concertmaster's chair in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Even if you couldn't see him, you'd probably know he was there, from the intensity and commitment of his playing. That approach to music-making has been a boost to the BSO since he was hired by then-music director Yuri Temirkanov in 2002. "Jon is a tremendously effective concertmaster, a very extrovert concertmaster," says BSO percussionist Brian Prechtl.

Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon describes a mythical village in which 18th-century folks wake up for only one day after sleeping 100 years. Reckoning in performing arts time, one might say nine years between performances in Annapolis equals a "Brigadoon" century. In February 2000, Annapolis Chorale music director J. Ernest Green brought Brigadoon to Maryland Hall's stage in what he recalls as "only the second musical in our 'Broadway in Annapolis' series." When Brigadoon debuted on Broadway in 1947, it marked musical team Lerner and Loewe's first success and was followed by blockbusters My Fair Lady in 1956 and Camelot in 1960.

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.

Leonard Slatkin returned this week to guest-conduct the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's for the first time in 15 years and brought with him an eclectic bag of repertoire. The result is that he kills two birds with one-half a program - Rossini's Thieving Magpie Overture and, via a piece composed by Slatkin himself, The Raven - and spends the remainder in the earthy realm of the Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius. That well-worn Sibelius score provided the most rewards last night at the Music Center at Strathmore.

A recent and welcome addition to the region's cultural scene is "Music in the Valley" at the gothic-style, postcard-pretty St. John's Episcopal Church in Glyndon (the sort of place where you'd expect to bump into Miss Marple). This season's four-concert series begins with the Monument Piano Trio, ensemble-in-residence at An die Musik. This group, which has an admirable track record for dynamic music-making, includes pianist Matthew Sheppard and two Baltimore Symphony Orchestra members - assistant concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich and assistant principal cellist Dariusz Skoraczewski.

LaBeouf won't be charged with DUI in July crash Shia LaBeouf will not be charged with drunken driving for a West Hollywood traffic accident that badly injured his hand, but he could have his license suspended for refusing to take a breath test. There was "insufficient evidence" to charge LaBeouf with drunken driving, Los Angeles County District Attorney spokeswoman Jane Robison said Thursday. She said prosecutors are considering charges against two other people involved in the July collision.

I kind of grew up with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra," says Yo-Yo Ma, the exceedingly gifted and adventurous cellist who will be the featured artist in the BSO's season-launching gala Saturday. "So I'm very excited about doing the opening concert." Ma, chatting by phone from his summer home in the Berkshires, recalls first performing with the orchestra in its pre-Meyerhoff Symphony Hall days at the Lyric Opera House with then-music director Sergiu Comissiona. "He was an incredibly kind man, very paternal to me," the cellist says.

Moments after the 32-year-old former music director of West Baltimore's Bethel AME Church was sentenced yesterday to seven years in prison for having sex with a 12-year-old parishioner, he collapsed in the courtroom, setting off a screaming match between two families that ended with the defendant's mother unresponsive and shaking on the hallway floor. Timothy D. Price III of Owings Mills was revived moments later and heard Baltimore Circuit Judge Robert B. Kershaw's final post-sentencing remarks about his conviction for second-degree rape of the girl.