Violin

AAUW branch offers 4 scholarships of $1,500 The Severna Park Branch of the American Association of University Women is offering four scholarships of $1,500 each to female college students of Anne Arundel County. The scholarship is awarded in two installments of $750 per semester for the 2005-2006 academic year. Interested students may obtain an application at the Anne Arundel Community College Financial Aid Office. Applications are due back to the chair of the Transfer Scholarship Committee by March 1. A cover letter attached to the application provides additional details about the application process.

First of all (with apologies to FDR), let me assert my firm belief that the only thing a lot of concert-goers have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes them every time they face modern music. It's amazing how much fun people can have when they loosen the bonds of that fear. Consider the case of two performances last weekend, where audiences not previously known for intrepidity gave every appearance of relishing heavy-on-the-contemporary programs.

Any program devoted to works by Vivaldi for solo instrument(s) and orchestra invariably calls to mind a stale joke: He didn't write 500 concertos; he wrote one concerto 500 times. But such a program performed with the kind of technical bravado and unwavering musicality displayed last night by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra demolishes that punch line. The big draw for this conductor-less concert is The Four Seasons, a work with an indestructible position high up on the classical hit parade.

The number of concerts packing the calendar is only slightly less than the number of cicadas currently burrowing their way to the surface, so the classical-music lover can't possibly run out of things to do. The only trouble will be trying to choose, because, as usual around here, many enticements are scheduled for the same day, if not the same hour. Here's a chronological rundown of coming attractions well worth checking out. This weekend, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will perform topless - in a manner of speaking.

He had just completed an aching rendition of Sibelius' dramatic Violin Concerto, and as a sold-out Meyerhoff Hall audience gave him a third standing ovation, guest instrumentalist Gidon Kremer returned to the stage, bowing deeply. He seemed to gaze toward a box above the stage, where two men sat who, in the eyes of many onlookers, shared star billing last night. The acclaimed violinist dedicated his encore "to all those wonderful people who reunited me with my violin." Mike Famiglietti of Abingdon and Joseph Butler of Washington, career Amtrak employees, had teamed up on Wednesday to reclaim an item left behind on a train.

Things happen," Gidon Kremer said yesterday, exuding much more calm than you might expect from someone who had left a $3 million violin on a train a few hours earlier. "I can't justify myself," added the acclaimed, Latvian-born violinist, after being reunited with his fiddle at Meyerhoff Hall, where he will be the guest artist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tonight through Saturday. "I can only explain." Kremer arrived at Baltimore's Penn Station from New York in the same condition he spent the past 10 days of his U.S. tour: sleep-deprived.

Man gets life sentence in death of friend A Havre de Grace man was sentenced Wednesday to life without parole for the first-degree murder of a friend whom he shot after a night of gambling. Robert Scott Earl, 24, of the 500 block of Bourbon St. received an additional 40 years on armed robbery and handgun charges in the death of Troy Reid, 30, of Havre de Grace, said Diana Brooks, deputy state's attorney. According to court records, Earl became angry at Reid after playing dice in Havre de Grace's Hilltown neighborhood July 31, 2002.

How is a viola different from an onion? Nobody cries when you cut up a viola. In the hierarchical world of classical musicians, viola players have had, more than most, to bear the strings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For nearly five centuries, they have been portrayed - doubtless unfairly - as the dumb blondes of the symphony orchestra. On the Internet, in the break room, at parties, violists are the butt of jokes that cast aspersions on their intelligence and musicianship. Jokes that take a vicious glee in imagining the destruction of their instruments.

Like racehorses and royalty, orchestras have bloodlines, too. And no orchestra in the world has blood any bluer than Germany's Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig. Founded in 1781 by Leipzig's civic leadership three decades after the death of Johannes Sebastian Bach, the city's most illustrious adopted son, the Gewandhaus quickly became one of Europe's most distinguished orchestras. It was from the Gewandhaus podium that 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn presided over the musical renaissance that placed the music of Bach at the core of the mainstream symphonic repertory.

The student: Jennifer Leung, 15 School: Howard High Special achievement: She was concertmaster for the 2003 Maryland All-State Orchestra's March performance. She had to go through three levels of auditions to be placed as first-chair violin, the concertmaster's position in the orchestra. What is a concertmaster? If the conductor wants the orchestra members to play by themselves, "the first stand just leads everybody, and everybody has to watch their motions. They have their violin, and they sort of move it up and down in cues," Jennifer said.