Vienna

VIENNA, Austria -- The flowers said it all. As Yuri Temirkanov returned to the stage for a traditional solo bow after conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's European tour-ending concert Saturday night at Vienna's gilded Konzerthaus, something unconventional happened. A large bouquet of flowers worked its way from the back of the orchestra toward him - a percussionist handed it to a wind player who handed it to a string player who handed it to the startled music director. The token of appreciation and affection from the ensemble capped Temirkanov's third and final international tour with the BSO. He steps down as music director in June, after six years.

VIENNA, Md. - "Would you look at that current," says Ed Haile, watching a strong ebb tide sweep past here, just downstream of where U.S. 50 crosses the Nanticoke River. "Hard to imagine they could have moved upriver against this," Haile says. It's the summer of 2005, but Haile, a noted researcher of the Jamestown Colony and its leader, Capt. John Smith, is talking about a June morning nearly four centuries ago - and about a mystery we're here to clear up. On June 9, 1608, Smith and a dozen or so Jamestowners lay anchored in their small open boat off the Indian village of Nause, several miles south of present-day Vienna.

LONDON -- Nazi loot.To Mark Poltimore of the auction house Christie's, the words were as dark and chilling as the rooms he explored 10 years ago inside the 14th century Mauerbach monastery outside Vienna.Spread across wooden racks and propped up against walls were art objects plundered from primarily Jewish middle-class homes in Austria before and during World War II and left at the monastery for decades."You look at these amazing objects and you wonder, 'What happened to the owners?' " Poltimore said.

Even 400 years later, the Nanticoke River still welcomes waterborne visitors with unspoiled marshy and forested vistas very much like those that greeted the bold English sea captain who charted the Chesapeake Bay. Just north of Vienna, the modernity of the Route 50 bridge, gritty power plant and soaring utility lines quickly give way to lush aprons of sea grasses, pinky white hibiscus, purple pickerel weed and wild rice. These natural breadbaskets of the native peoples John Smith encountered along his route buffer thick stands of red maple, green ash and black gum. The trees are not so tall as those of Capt.

In Johnny Guitar (1954), part of a cycle of haywire "adult" westerns and this week's entry in the Saturday revival series at the Charles, Nicholas Ray, an unabashedly baroque director, tarts up a ranchers vs. outsiders saga with wild colors, a barreling pace and overt, hilarious sexual innuendoes. There may be other cowboy movies with Johnny Guitar's quantity of action, though none has as much going on just beneath the surface. It's probably the weirdest picture ever turned out by Republic Pictures, once Hollywood's leading Western factory.

While it's not the biggest birthday commemorated this month, Ludwig Van Beethoven's 225th will be celebrated today with music and song at Oakland Manor in Columbia.Five members of the Annapolis Opera will present a Beethoven birthday celebration with early instrumental and vocal works by the great classical composer and father of the Romantic movement.The opera company has chosen to honor a composer who bridled at the classical tradition of his upbringing and struggled to create a new form with landmark symphonic, chamber and choral works that dot pop culture.

Conectiv Inc., the Wilmington, Del.-based utility that serves parts of Harford County and most of Maryland's Eastern Shore, said yesterday that it will sell four power plants -- including one in Vienna -- and its interests in two others to a Minneapolis-based utility for $800 million. Conectiv said it will use proceeds from the sale to finance a buyback of 5 million shares of its stock that began yesterday and will run until 2002. The proceeds will also finance debt repayment and new investments, the company said.

VIENNA -- Austrians go to the polls today to elect a successor to their controversial president, Kurt Waldheim, in an uneasy political climate that belies the country's emergence as the the region's economic and political heart.Instead of being optimistic over the country's gains and the expected end of its international isolation caused by Mr. Waldheim's Nazi past, many voters are frustrated with the country's moribund political establishment and are experimenting with far-right parties.

VIENNA, Austria -- Ukrainian presidential hopeful Viktor A. Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, most likely intentionally, doctors in Vienna who have been struggling to diagnose his mystery illness confirmed yesterday. Yushchenko, a pro-Western opposition leader engaged in a bitter presidential contest, has alleged since suddenly falling ill in September that he was poisoned in an assassination attempt intended to eliminate a key critic of Ukraine's government. Authorities have denied the charge, and some government supporters have ridiculed it. Michael Zimpfer, director of the private Rudolfinerhaus clinic, which has been treating Yushchenko, said tests concluded in the past 24 hours prove that dioxin caused the illness that has disfigured the Ukrainian candidate's face.

In the gloomy warehouse where the Baltimore Opera Company held early rehearsals for its season-opening production of La Traviata, conductor Julius Rudel perched on a stool, keeping an ear on every note from the singers, an eye on every movement. Periodically, when there was a little break in the action, he approached them to offer a quick, quiet word of advice about phrasing. And when Julius Rudel offers advice, only the incurably smug would ignore it. The conductor exudes an air of gentle authority.