Peabody

A week after receiving one of this year's Kennedy Center Honors, Leon Fleisher performed two-hand piano music with inspiring confidence and expressive power at the Peabody Institute. Denied the use of his right hand for decades due to a neurological movement disorder, the pianist has made a gradual return to ambidexterity in recent years, thanks to Botox injections. As Fleisher is the first to point out, his condition has hardly been healed, just modified. So every occasion to hear him in double-barrel music-making is to be treasured.

Jeff Chang closes his jazz saxophone solo with a post-bebop flourish on a recent Monday night. "How was that?" he says happily to an audience of 10 or so at An Die Musik. "`Like Sonny' by John Coltrane. I told you it's a great tune." Chang, 30, plays alto saxophone in a quartet with Devin Arne, 21, on guitar, Blake Meister, 22, on bass and Shareef Taher, 24, drums. The group plays each Monday night at An Die Musik. Henry Wong, the eclectic proprietor, says he reserves Mondays for Peabody Conservatory jazz musicians so they can get experience performing.

If there's a problem child among Gustav Mahler's nine symphonies, it's No. 7. A little unwieldy and unruly, prone to go off in unexpected directions, the Seventh has never been quite as easy to love as the others. But the work responds well to discipline, respect and affection, qualities it received Tuesday night by conductor Hajime Teri Murai and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra. Mahler, a little obsessive about death, slipped something funereal into all of his symphonies, usually to profound effect.

The setting fit a description of the opening scene of the Italian opera "Don Giovanni -- "in a handsome garden before a handsome house." Only this was the fourth annual Opera and Wine Dinner, an authentic alfresco Italian meal in Howard County. The event, sponsored by the Italian Wine and Food Advocates, raised $1,500 for the Peabody Conservatory's opera outreach program, which brings opera to inner city schools.Under one tent pitched on the grounds of the historic Lichendale Farm, Paul Dongarra, chef for the Dionysus' Kitchen catering company and the event's co-coordinator, prepared the evening's five-course dinner.

Ever since Charles Kim began composing music at age 11 or so, he has done what most composers do: struggle to get his original work heard by as many people as possible.Kim has given recitals at which he played his own music. He has composed soundtracks to his friends' independent films. He has posted his compositions on the Internet. "There are all the traditional ways of getting heard: You can set up your own performances, scrape together enough money from your other jobs that actually pay to get someone to perform your music, or just hope someone will play your music," he says.

Richard Lackland Higgins, retired co-chairman of the music education department at Peabody Conservatory of Music and director of the Peabody Wind Ensemble, died Sunday of leukemia at his lifelong Gambrills home. He was 80.Mr. Higgins joined the faculty of the Mount Vernon Place conservatory in 1955 as a teacher of musical instrumental methods, and in 1969 was named co-chairman of the music education department. He retired in 1984.He taught music appreciation at Anne Arundel Community College from 1988 until he retired a second time in 1995.

An arched steel gate guards the entrance. Beside it looms a guard booth with video camera, electronic card scanner and emergency call box.A passer-by might mistake this fortress-like compound at the center of Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood for a prison. But it's actually an incubator for some of the nation's most brilliant classical musicians.Starting this month, the Peabody Institute plans to open itself up to the city and breathe fresh air into its cloistered image.For the first time in its 142-year history, the institute has launched an economic development project to help jazz up its historic neighborhood.

Baltimore Theatre Alliance. Auditions for BTA members and the general public. On-stage performers, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. May 15, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. May 17; off-stage talent exchange, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. May 8. Both events at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St. Call 410-783-0777.Burtonsville Players Summer Teen Theatre. "Macbeth Did It." 2 p.m. May 16 and 7 p.m. May 19 at the theater, near the cinema in back of the Laurel Lakes shopping center complex, U.S. 1 in Laurel. Call 301-879-8603.Harford Dance Theatre.

Nyla Wright Woodside, a well-known local pianist and singer, died Thursday of complications of liver cancer at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. She was 70.A Baltimore native, Mrs. Woodside graduated from Eastern High School in 1946 and attended the Peabody Conservatory to study voice, piano and opera. She graduated in 1949 with a teacher's certificate in voice.Her musical debut as a soprano, at a concert dedicating the band shell at Clifton Park in 1949, led to a series of radio programs and an invitation to be the soloist for the combined 70-piece No. 1 Park and Municipal Band's Independence Day program at the park in 1950.

You may hear drums beating above the noise of the crowds at the millennial New Year's Eve celebration in New York's Times Square. You may hear bells from Bali, electric violins, trumpets, a "space flute" and an aboriginal didgeridoo.But you won't see them.The instruments are part of a computer-generated "virtual orchestra" led by Baltimore conductor Forrest Tobey and developed at Peabody Institute that will perform on New Year's Eve in Times Square at what is being dubbed the "world's biggest party."

When he stands before an orchestra, his cues are precise, his tempos clear; his face takes on a wide variety of expressions, from fierce to cherubic, as he shapes the melodic phrases. The only outward sign that Ilyich Rivas is not a seasoned professional conductor is some telltale acne. He's all of 16. Ilyich is doing what many in the music community consider remarkable. Having hurriedly earned his GED last June, he is now at the Peabody Conservatory in a diploma program designed for graduate students.

theater 'Ragtime': This is an all-new production of one of the great musicals of our times. The stage version of E.L. Doctorow's novel is a masterly interweaving of the fates of a middle-class Victorian family, an immigrant Jewish family and an African-American jazz player. Performances are Saturday through May 17 at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. N.W., Washington. Tickets are $25-$90. Call 800-444-1324 or go to kennedy-center.org. Mary Carole McCauley art Landscape shows: Two landscape-oriented shows open today at C. Grimaldis Gallery, 523 N. Charles St.: New Work by visual artist Christopher Saah and a group show titled Landscapes Into Art, featuring work by Fairfield Porter, Robert Dash and others.

While many folks will be making last-minute checks on stashes of beer and munchies Sunday, others will be spending the pre-Super Bowl hours reveling in baroque music. "SuperBach Sunday" is a long-running annual presentation by Pro Musica Rara, Baltimore's intrepid early-music organization. This year's concert features the return of two fine guests, soprano Ann Monoyios and trumpeter John Thiessen. The concert, which promises music by Bach, Handel and Purcell, will be at 3:30 p.m. at Towson University's Center for the Arts, Osler and Cross Campus drives.

Wayne Conner, a much-revered Peabody Institute vocal teacher whose tenure in the classroom lasted nearly 45 years, died of liver cancer Friday at Jefferson Medical Center in Philadelphia. He was 79. "He was a beloved Peabody figure," said James Harp, the Baltimore Opera Company's artistic administrator, who was a former student. "He was a walking encyclopedia of vocal music. His classes were required for all voice students, but he was such a wonderful teacher, other students would sign up to hear him."

Two months after WYPR fired him, Marc Steiner won a Peabody Award yesterday - just as the public radio station kicked off a fund drive that it had postponed in the wake of the intense outcry that followed the host's dismissal. The Peabody recognized Steiner's 2007 series titled Just Words, a documentary that featured the voices of addicts, ex-felons and the homeless. Steiner, who nominated his work for the prize, called it "an amazing honor." "The idea was that nobody heard the words and stories of the working poor of America and what they have to say about their own lives," Steiner said.

Ruth H. Peabody, the widow of the former dean of the Episcopal cathedral, died in her sleep of Alzheimer's disease complications Feb. 23 at Copper Ridge in Sykesville. The former Guilford resident was 91. Born Ruth Helen Junker in Emery, S.D., she earned a bachelor's degree at Smith College. She was married for 61 years to the Very Rev. John N. Peabody, the former rector and first dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Baltimore. Dean Peabody died in 2002. "She was very devoted to her family, ministry, interfaith and ecumenical relations, civil rights, peace and justice, environmentalism, and assisting refugees from Southeast Asia," said her son, Bradford C. Peabody, an attorney who lives in Baltimore.

Top-flight teachers attract top-flight students, and Howard County music-lovers will be the beneficiaries of that happy truism Sunday afternoon. Columbia's "Sundays at Three" chamber music series will present two of the Peabody Institute's rising stars - flutist Anastasia Petanova and guitarist Lukasz Kuropaczewski - in an alluring program of works by Giuliani, Tansman, Reinecke, and Debussy. The 3 p.m. concert will be held at Christ Episcopal Church on Oakland Mills Road, opposite Dobbin Road, in Columbia.

A week after receiving one of this year's Kennedy Center Honors, Leon Fleisher performed two-hand piano music with inspiring confidence and expressive power at the Peabody Institute. Denied the use of his right hand for decades due to a neurological movement disorder, the pianist has made a gradual return to ambidexterity in recent years, thanks to Botox injections. As Fleisher is the first to point out, his condition has hardly been healed, just modified. So every occasion to hear him in double-barrel music-making is to be treasured.

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS BRAC IS NO PANACEA People are overestimating the economic impact base realignment and closure would have on Maryland to bolster a sagging economy. Business baltimoresun.com/hancock Turn the other chic Maybe Baltimore should lighten up a little and take a cue from Scranton, Pa., which, as the setting for NBC's The Office, takes a beating but keeps laughing about it. Today baltimoresun.com/cowherd OTHER VOICES Gregory Kane on pet ownership -- Maryland Laura Vozzella on governor's mansion -- Maryland 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Musical poet -- Morrissey, the lead singer of the British 1980s indie group the Smiths, comes to Rams Head Live.

The conductor has heard enough. His hand shoots into the air, and the 20-year-old clarinetist in the bright orange shirt abruptly stops playing a Mozart concerto. Kyle Beard's eight minutes are up. It's the first day of his junior year in college, and Beard has already taken his most important test. The one that will determine whether he has finally landed a chair in the coveted symphony orchestra at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. "If you are an orchestral musician, you will spend your first week here, or possibly your first day, nervous as hell," said Beard, while waiting for the formal results of his audition.