Second Movement

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is serving up a meaty program this week and is welcoming back some substantial guest artists to help deliver it. Midori, the supernaturally gifted violinist and energetic champion of music education, makes her first BSO appearance since 2001 playing Bartok's Violin Concerto No. 2. On Thursday night at Meyerhoff Hall, she burrowed so deeply into this complex and ever-fascinating score that she seemed to be composing it...

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is serving up a meaty program this week and is welcoming back some substantial guest artists to help deliver it. Midori, the supernaturally gifted violinist and energetic champion of music education, makes her first BSO appearance since 2001 playing Bartok's Violin Concerto No. 2. On Thursday night at Meyerhoff Hall, she burrowed so deeply into this complex and ever-fascinating score that she seemed to be composing it...

Brahms' First Piano Concerto asks a lot from the soloist. The pianist must be nothing less than an Olympic athlete and a Romantic hero. In her performance of the piece with the Peabody Concert Orchestra and conductor Hajime Teri Murai in Friedberg Hall Saturday, Marian Hahn performed both roles with full measure.She had the temperament for the fiery outer movements; the right feel for the mournful and meditative second movement; the heroic sonority necessary to project through the dense orchestration; and the endurance to suggest that -- had she been asked -- she could have sat down and played the piece all over again.

Annapolis became a major cultural metropolis this month, thanks to the presentation of two musical masterworks — one by a major 19th-century symphony composer, the other by a major 19th-century opera composer. Both works, which premiered within 20 years of each other, focus on the meaning of life and death. At the U.S. Naval Academy's Alumni Hall on April 19, the Distinguished Artists Series closed with the 39th annual Spring Oratorio. The presentation of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 featured Aaron Smith conducting the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Naval Academy men's and women's glee clubs, the Goucher College Chorus, and soloists.

"Mahler has a special place in my soul," Yuri Temirkanov says. "I don't know why. Don't ask me." The conductor, who has led the BSO in the first two Mahler symphonies since becoming music director, turns to the Third this week. (He'll add the Fifth next season.) Temirkanov discovered the music of Mahler while playing the Third Symphony as a member of an orchestra in Russia in the 1950s. "Mahler had not been played in Russia for 15 years," Temirkanov says, "so it was a complete revelation to me."

Like former Baltimore Symphony music director David Zinman, conductor Mario Venzago is conversant with scholarship about performance practice in the classical era. And, like Zinman, the Swiss conductor has paid attention to the lessons taught by performances of the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven repertory on period instruments.It's scarcely a surprise, therefore, that Venzago's performance of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony with the BSO Saturday evening in Meyerhoff Hall shared certain characteristics with those given by Zinman.

Murray Perahia may be more of a medium than a pianist. When he plays, it's as if he is somehow channeling the essence of a composer, not merely articulating notes of a score. Bach materializes before us, super-sized, just the way we like to think of him - ingenious, playful, utterly sincere. Beethoven struts his obstinately individualistic stuff, daring us to question his methods or his motives. Schubert charms and surprises us, sometimes worries us a little. Such, at any rate, was the impression Wednesday night as Perahia performed music by those three men in a recital with the Shriver Hall Concert Series.

Over the past few decades, classical music has become increasingly concerned with notions of historical accuracy. Performers don't consider just the composer's intentions; they also try to emulate the instrumentation and performance practices of his time. But after hearing pianist Andras Schiff playing with and conducting the Baltimore Symphony last night, let me say this: Historicity is bunk. As Schiff understands, the point isn't to offer the past recaptured, but to present each work in a way that speaks clearly and vividly to the audience in modern terms.

In a world full of uncertainty, it's comforting to be surrounded by the certain pleasures of superb chamber music superbly played. That was the draw for a sizable crowd Thursday evening at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. The concert was built around veteran cellist Janos Starker, whose solid, no-nonsense musicianship has earned him great respect for more than 50 years. He was joined on this occasion by violinist William Preucil, the sterling concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra and former leader of the Cleveland Quartet who happens to be Starker's son-in-law; and pianist Shigeo Neriki, longtime Starker collaborator.

Leading a performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony must be as daunting as conducting an opera: So much can go wrong.If last night's season-concluding Baltimore Symphony performance of the work was not as large as the "Symphony of a Thousand" that Mahler conducted at the work's premiere in 1910 (in which 1,030 musicians participated), there was still plenty to concern BSO music director David Zinman: musicians on stage and in boxes; soloists on stage and in a box; and choristers on stage and in boxes.

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 American String Quartet's concert will provide an opportunity to be swept away by three remarkable pieces of music at 4 p.m. Sunday at Smith Theatre at Howard Community College. The American String Quartet, formed in 1974, has won critical acclaim for its performances of the classical string quartet repertoire and for its collaborations with distinguished contemporary composers. Sunday's program by quartet members Daniel Avshalomov (viola), Margo Tatgenhorst Drakos (cello), Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney (violins)

The consuming interest in the Washington area Thursday night was the return of baseball to the nation's capital, but that didn't seem to keep anyone away from the Music Center at Strathmore, where a young violinist hit one out of the park in the first inning and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra scored runs on its own in the second. The program, which has two more, well-worth-catching performances this weekend at the BSO's home plate (all right, I'll stop), revels in the melodic wealth and imaginative instrumental coloring of 1880s French romanticism.

Composers inevitably reveal much of themselves in just about anything they write, but when they choose the piano concerto as a medium, the revelations have a way of becoming particularly telling. You can get a strong reminder of this in the latest Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program, which offers two exceptional examples - and a superlative soloist to facilitate the communicating. Mozart couldn't be more direct and open-hearted than he is in his Concerto No. 27; for all of its grand C major flourishes and decorative trimmings, what shines through is an incredible eloquence and ingenuity of expression.

Jason Love and his Columbia Orchestra concluded the ensemble's 25th anniversary season at the Jim Rouse Theatre on Saturday evening by staring down the turbulent 5th Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich. And true to form, neither Love nor his players flinched. Shostakovich spent most of his artistic life being bullied and harassed by the Soviet government, which perceived the moody ambiguity of his music as a threat to the dictum that "scientific socialism" would produce nothing but smiles of gratitude in Stalin's Communist paradise.

Jason Love and his Columbia Orchestra concluded the ensemble's 25th anniversary season at Jim Rouse Theatre on Saturday evening by staring down the turbulent 5th Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich. And true to form, neither Love nor his players flinched. Shostakovich spent most of his artistic life being bullied and harassed by the Soviet government, which perceived the moody ambiguity of his music as a threat to the dictum that "scientific socialism" would produce nothing but smiles of gratitude in Stalin's Communist paradise.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to Meyerhoff Hall last night for a reprise of the concerto the late Stephen Albert wrote for him three years ago.Albert, who died in an automobile crash in December, was one of our best and most honest composers. Though there are nods in the directions of other pieces from other times -- late Romantic concertos in the first and third movements, a little Shostakovich in the skittish second movement and some middle-period Stravinsky in the final one -- there is not a cheap note in this piece.

In a recent Sun interview, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers revealed that it was Music Director David Zinman who selected Wieniawski's Second Concerto for this weekend's Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program. The 23-year-old violinist rather broadly hinted that the virtuoso showpiece was hardly among her favorites. Anyone who read that interview must have anticipated Ms. Meyers' performance with some degree of unease, if not trepidation.In truth, Ms. Meyers is among that calibre of violinists who are virtually incapable of a poor performance.

Murray Perahia may be more of a medium than a pianist. When he plays, it's as if he is somehow channeling the essence of a composer, not merely articulating notes of a score. Bach materializes before us, super-sized, just the way we like to think of him - ingenious, playful, utterly sincere. Beethoven struts his obstinately individualistic stuff, daring us to question his methods or his motives. Schubert charms and surprises us, sometimes worries us a little. Such, at any rate, was the impression Wednesday night as Perahia performed music by those three men in a recital with the Shriver Hall Concert Series.

If you're going to trot out an old warhorse, why not unleash a couple of colts, too? The wisdom of such balanced programming was reaffirmed in the latest presentation by the Concert Artists of Baltimore, which paired Grieg's well-trodden Piano Concerto with two remarkable pieces that rarely get an airing. The results of this all-Scandinavian evening proved consistently engaging Saturday at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts in Owings Mills. In the Little Suite for strings by Denmark's Carl Nielsen, his first published score, there's no mistaking a composer determined to go his own way. Melodic and harmonic surprises continually crop up to provide extra coloring to what is otherwise a large dollop of late-Romantic charm.