Symphony

Capstone Pharmacy Services of Baltimore yesterday completed the $150 million purchase of Symphony Pharmacy Services, the long-term-care pharmacy division of Integrated Health Services of Owings Mills.The deal had been announced five weeks ago. For Integrated, it allows the company to concentrate on its long-term-care business. It is expected to provide cash to make acquisitions in areas such as home health care.For Capstone, it vastly expands the business, which provides pharmacy services to prisons and to nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities.

Violinist Ellen Pendleton Troyer has struggled for years with the constraints of wearing evening attire for physical, sometimes-strenuous performances. And she considers herself luckier than her male counterparts, who have a stricter dress code of bow ties and evening jackets adorned with tails. "Our issues with the dress stem from a functionality standpoint," said Troyer, who plays first violin with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. "What we do is quite physical. There is a lot of sweating under the hot lights.

Someone's doing something right at the Peabody Conservatory.Saturday's inaugural concert of the Peabody Symphony, under its new music director Hajime Teri Murai, demonstrated that the conservatory has become a markedly better institution in the last few years. Open a closet door at Peabody nowadays and a talented string player is likely to fall out.In Weber's "Oberon Overture," it was quickly apparent that one was listening to a student orchestra that often came close to professional excellence.

Your paper has given us, side-by-side, three glaring examples of the sheer gall and/or utter shamelessness of the proponents of CA's scrapping of Symphony Woods Park in favor of turning over control of Symphony Woods (and at least 1.6 million of our lien payer dollars) to a new corporation, one which will be unbound by sunshine, transparency and accountability protections to which CA must hold. On page 16 (May 2) you give us CA Director Tom Coale telling us first that the recent election results show public support for CA's current direction.

Perhaps the second most wonderful thing about being young is being slow to recognize danger or difficultly. That's surely one reason why the battle of the skies in World War II was won putting American teen-agers in fighter planes. It must also have been a factor in the convincing performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 6 that the Peabody Symphony Orchestra gave Saturday evening in Friedberg Concert Hall.Under the baton of their music director, Hajime Teri Murai, the young musicians performed this fiercely difficult work, the most tragic in the Mahler canon, with energy, stamina and accuracy that would have made a professional orchestra proud.

Tonight at 7, the Goucher Chamber Symphony presents a performance including such works as Edvard Grieg's "Holberg Suite" and the "Shepherd's Dance" from Amahl and the Night Visitors. The event is free and takes place in Goucher College's Haebler Memorial Chapel, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road. For information, call the box office at 410-337-6333.

Gordon Cyr's Symphony No. 2 shares with Dimitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6 a peculiarity of construction. An emotionally gigantic (and in the case of the Shostakovich, gigantic in duration) first movement is followed by two smaller movements that seem to bear little relation to it.In the case of the Shostakovich No. 6, this works out well enough because the second and third movements are fun to listen to and easy to follow. In the case of the Cyr No. 2, which received its world premiere in Meyerhoff Hall last night from David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony, I was lost after the first movement.

Mention "minimalism" in the same breath as "avant-garde classical music" and you're likely to send the average record buyer scurrying for cover behind the nearest Madonna poster. So we were intrigued by a report from London earlier this year describing the spectacular success of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor David Zinman's recording of Polish composer Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, which reached the top of the British classical and pop charts, and outsold both Madonna and David Bowie.

David Zinman's tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra may be remembered for giving birth to some important pieces of American music. One of the best of them may be John Harbison's Symphony No. 3, which was commissioned for the BSO's 75th season and which received its premiere last night in Meyerhoff Hall.The symphony -- it runs a little more than 20 minutes, and its five movements are played without pause -- doesn't contain anything that cries out to be remembered.But it is beautifully put together and explores a broad spectrum of emotions.

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 is a difficult piece to hold together: a gigantic and weighty first movement that is followed by a brief, if ferocious, scherzo; and a pensive third movement, ending in a ghostly passage for flute and piccolo, that is followed by a drunkenly joyous finale that sounds almost as if it could be by Haydn.There are echoes of other works -- Liszt's "Faust" Symphony, Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and even Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata -- but the Tenth is an utterly original work, as great as it is difficult.

The good news about the Spring For Music festival at Carnegie Hall is that it chooses American orchestras of all sizes to bring off-the-beaten-path programs to the nation's premier classical music showplace, and charges only $25 a seat. The bad news is that there isn't enough funding to keep the festival going past next spring. The good news is that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra got to open the penultimate festival Monday night, and do so with considerable flair, delivering a particularly impressive performance of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 led by music director Marin Alsop.

NEW YORK -- Carnegie Hall put out the purple Monday night to welcome the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for the opening of Spring For Music, a week-long festival showcasing American orchestras playing adventurous programs. Ravens-colored cloths adorned the seat backs of the musicians' chairs and the conductor's podium; more cloths were handed out to audience members to wave on cue in a salute to Baltimore. That cue came before the music started when an announcer from local radio station  WQXR interviewed the BSO's high-profile booster, Gov. Martin O'Malley, onstage.

If it has a good beat, you can count on Marin Alsop to conduct it with infectious energy. That point is being driven home by her latest program with the Baltimore Symphony, which has one more local performance before the orchestra takes it to Carnegie Hall on Monday. To start this sampling of 20th and 21st century repertoire, there is the pulsating “Shaker Loops,” an early-1980s classic of minimalism for string orchestra by John Adams. To close, Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 (the revised version of 1947)

For at least a generation of pop-culture consumers, the soundtrack of their lives has included themes from the likes of Mega Man and Super Mario. As they've grown up, the music of video games has branched out - to solo piano, to rock concerts and to symphonic performances. Among the developments is the University of Maryland's Gamer Symphony Orchestra, whose 100-plus members will take to the stage at College Park's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Saturday, May 4. "The quality of video-game music has grown exponentially over the years," says Joel Guttman, president-elect of the group, which specializes in arranging and performing pieces taken from the background music on video games such as Halo, Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy.

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 is about to become one of the very few, if not the first, major classical orchestras in the United States to officially appoint a playwright in residence. This weekend, Didi Balle will preside over the third of her "symphonic plays" to be performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The form, which Balle invented, combines a live orchestra, a conductor who delivers a scripted narrative and professional actors. In a news release, conductor Marin Alsop said that the appointment formalizes a relationship between Balle and the symphony that began in 2008.

What turned out to be some of the most turbulent days in modern American history - a time of great suffering, uncertainty, fear and paranoia - gave birth to a musical work that provided artistic refuge to me as a Maryland composer. On the day the country experienced the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, I and another artist began scripting the Day of Sorrow Symphony, which was not a musical work that I could have ever imagined, conceived or planned previously. Though the classical score has been described as beautiful and remorseful, yet an emotionally uplifting work by the select few who have heard it, it was a philharmonic work that I would have rather not existed, or at least not under the tragic circumstances that originally gave birth to it. I was on my way to work at the Senator Theatre that morning.

Bruckner, Symphony No. 8 in A major. Bach/Webern, Ricercare, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor (London 436-153-2)Dohnanyi continues to record the Bruckner symphonies, and this is another example of the beauty and power of the playing of the current Cleveland Orchestra. As he has done in his earlier Bruckner recordings, Dohnanyi, the Cleveland's music director, delivers a no-nonsense performance along classical lines. The conductor does best in the extroverted first, third and fourth movements.

Alex Hekimian exemplifies the best qualifications to represent Oakland Mills on the CA Board of Directors! I have known Alex for over 15 years and he has consistently impressed me with his dedication. He is honest, knowledgeable and tireless in his efforts to maintain the highest standards for our city and its citizens! In 2011 as CA was finalizing plans for a $6 million clubhouse construction at Hobbits Glen, they were also planning to close three pools and some tot lots in Oakland Mills.

I am thrilled the Columbia Association and the Columbia Council Representatives responded to the present and future needs of our community in moving forward with the McCall/Inner Arbor Plan for Symphony Woods. The previous plan was generally found to have missed the mark, and was additionally rejected by the Planning Board. The McCall Plan was created out of the very real need for something better. It was presented to the community. Response was heard in person, by email and by petition.