Violin

In 1689 - soon after Newton discovered the laws of motion and just before the Salem Witch trials - a violin was crafted in Bologna, Italy. Surviving perhaps 15 to 20 musicians, its spruce and maple body becoming looser and drier, the violin has aged as well as a bottle of premium Bordeaux. Three centuries later, it resonates at the touch of Peabody Conservatory student Igor Yuzefovich, who earned the right to play the $160,000 violin by winning the school's annual Marbury Competition.

The devil, in various guises, cavorted through the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's Summer MusicFest program Wednesday evening at Meyerhoff Hall, providing a helluva good time. There was Mephistopheles, stirring up hormones in Liszt's Mephisto Waltz. And Paganini, the violinist/composer whose ability to zip through fiendishly difficult music had people convinced he had sold his soul to Beelzebub. And Till Eulenspiegel, the devilish prankster from the Middle Ages immortalized in a Richard Strauss tone poem.

Guitarists are the corporate raiders of classical music. Unlike pianists, they don't have a nearly inexhaustible supply of repertoire composed specifically for their instrument, so they're always on the lookout for something to pounce on and transform into fresh material. Franco Platino, an Italian-born, Baltimore-based classical guitarist, demonstrated this specialized art of borrowing during his exceptional recital Saturday evening at Catonsville Community College's Fine Arts Theatre.

At the unlikely age of 37, Cho-Liang Lin has become one of the elder statesmen of the violin world."When I was a kid, I had the attitude that I had to go out and knock the socks off the conductor and the orchestra as well as the audience," says Lin, who will perform Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Baltimore Symphony tonight and tomorrow evening. "Now, I feel a heavier sense of responsibility. I have to share with my audiences what I have learned rather than impress them."It seems only yesterday that Isaac Stern predicted that the then-19-year-old Taiwanese-American violinist would become one of music's superstars -- and Lin has fulfilled that prediction.

Last November, McDonogh girls basketball coach Seth Kushkin asked his players to jot down individual goals for the season. Vicki Brick wrote just one -- to work harder than anyone else.Although only a freshman, Brick lives by those words.She arrived at McDonogh already highly touted in basketball and even better in tennis. Ranked eighth in the Middle Atlantic Tennis Association at 16-and-under, she swept the AIS championship without losing a set last fall.At 11, Brick decided she wanted to join the pro tennis tour by the time she was 16 or 17. Since then, she has worked double time.

The 39 students who came to the first Baltimore String Orchestra Camp didn't know they were beginning a tradition.Now, 25 years later, the nine-day camp has grown to 176 participants, three conductors and 15 teachers."

The Rev. Augustus Hackmann, the retired pastor of Catonsville's Second English Lutheran Church who preached sermons until he was 96, died of congestive heart failure Thursday at the Charlestown Retirement Community. The Catonsville resident was 97. Born in Baltimore and raised in the Curtis Bay section, he was a 1927 City College graduate who earned an education diploma from the old Maryland State Normal School, now Towson University. He taught elementary subjects for six years in the Baltimore public schools system and earned a bachelor's degree at the Johns Hopkins University.

Guitarist and singer Shelly Blake-Plock's newest project may be his most eclectic and ambitious yet. Blake-Plock (aka R. Richard Wojewodzki), a 32-year-old who lives in Elkridge, has been a musical force in the local and European experimental folk scenes for several years. His latest album, The Violencestring, bridges the continental gap with a cast of more than a dozen musicians from as far as France and Sweden and as close as the Peabody Institute. The Violencestring's central narrative centers on a boy abused by his father and mother who seeks solace in the violin.

Joseph DePasquale picks up the viola with big blunt fingers and applies his bow strongly and steadily.His instrument, its hourglass figure recognizably female, its body varnished to a dark gloss, sings wordlessly in a clear, dark voice, uncannily like a woman's."

Josef Gingold knows more about the violin than any man alive. He's the one who introduced the 13-year-old Itzhak Perlman to chamber music, he's the teacher of Joshua Bell and he's the guy who suggested to a 14-year-old violin wunderkind, wise guy and would-be pool shark named Pinchas Zukerman that he might also look into the viola. To put it in a staccato stroke: Gingold's the maestro behind many bows -- he's the greatest violin teacher in the world."Look, my dear, my whole life is centered around that little cheese box of ours," Gingold says when he's asked why -- after two strokes and at the age of 82 -- he continues to teach more than 20 students each year at Indiana University.