National Symphony

When the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra sets up on the lawn of Strathmore Hall in Bethesda on Thursday, it will give a different kind of concert.This is actually the third time the BSO has played on a summer evening at Strathmore, but in previous years the concerts have been just for the fun of it. This week, the BSO stakes out its future.In four to five years - four, if all goes according to the plans of Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan - the BSO will have a year-round hall behind Strathmore, a historic mansion built in 1902 on 10 acres of beautifully maintained grounds.

On a shelf in Leonard Slatkin's office at the Kennedy Center sit three of his half-dozen Grammy Awards, alongside photographs of him receiving honors from the two presidents whose terms coincided with his own as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. That tenure ends this month after 12 eventful seasons. "I think I did a lot," Slatkin says, in between sips of a soda. "Not as much as I would have liked, but a lot." If those accomplishments had to be summed up in a single sentence, it might be: He put the "national" in the National Symphony.

There may not be a plethora of truly notable conductors, but you wouldn't have known that around here last weekend, as eminent music-makers from Russia (and environs) revved up three different orchestras. In Baltimore, Yuri Temirkanov led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a richly inflected Tchaikovsky program at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. In Washington, Mariss Jansons and the Pittsburgh Symphony produced electrifying results in the Kennedy Concert Hall a couple hours before Valery Gergiev and the National Symphony Orchestra followed suit in that same spot.

The Baltimore Symphony won't call it an invasion.The National Symphony in Washington won't say anything at all.But Tuesday's performance at Wolf Trap Park of an all-Russian program by the BSO and music director-designate Yuri Temirkanov may be the opening skirmish in what could be called the Battle of the Bands.The BSO has played before at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in Fairfax, Va., which is the summer home of the National Symphony Orchestra. But this will be the Baltimore orchestra's first venture into NSO country under the Russian-born Temir-kanov, one of classical music's most admired maestros and the most distinguished musician ever to occupy the BSO's podium.

When faced with Olivier Messiaen's 80-minute "Turangalila-Symphony," Igor Stravinsky took aim and fired: "Little more can be required to write such things than a plentiful supply of ink." It's an understandable reaction, given the sheer magnitude of this astonishing work from 1948, which received its first National Symphony Orchestra performance Thursday at the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall. But it's really not so easy to dismiss Messiaen's achievement. Stravinsky apparently couldn't hear the magic and mystery of "Turangalila," its incredible audacity and breadth of vision.

Video-game music is making the leap from consoles to concert halls with PLAY! a video-game symphony world tour that comes to Wolf Trap tomorrow. With a full orchestra and choir, the concert presents symphonic scores adapted from such blockbuster games as Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Halo, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kingdom Hearts, World of Warcraft and more. "We're elevating the music of video gaming; it's not just a limited niche," said Jason Michael Paul, producer of PLAY!

A recent visit to Christoph Eschenbach's office at the Kennedy Center presented a starkly contrasting image — the conductor all in black, his preferred color on and offstage, sitting on an intensely white leather sofa against white walls. Not a bad visual metaphor for the way Eschenbach is viewed in the music world. Opinions about the new, German-born music director of the National Symphony Orchestra and the first music director of the Kennedy Center (a post created for him)

If you're up on your Book of Revelations, the number 144,000 will have an immediate significance. If you're up on your musical training, you may be able to hear that number - and other biblical references - translated into sound when the National Symphony Orchestra premieres Beyond Rivers of Vision this week. The composer is James Lee III, who recently joined the faculty at Morgan State University as an assistant professor in composition and theory. And the three-movement composition was his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor - written less than a year ago. That the score should get its first performance in such a high-profile manner, with NSO music director and American music champion Leonard Slatkin conducting, makes quite a statement.

Just as in Baltimore, many music lovers in Washington looked to the visiting Philadelphia Orchestra for their high art fixes during the early decades of the 20th century. They couldn't be counted on to give locally built ensembles much credence. But such snootiness didn't stop the National Symphony Orchestra from being founded in 1931, any more than it kept the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from getting off the ground 15 years before that. There had been previous attempts to establish a homegrown orchestra in D.C., as far back as 1902.

Roll over, Verdi. Since 1847, the music world has recognized only one significant operatic version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the one by Verdi. That work is still in no danger of being supplanted, but audiences will soon get to hear a few notes by another eminent composer who, about 35 years before Verdi, was attracted to the idea of turning that play into an opera - none other than Beethoven. On Sept. 20 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the National Symphony Orchestra will give the world premiere of the Overture to Beethoven's Macbeth - or at least the next best thing.