Violinist

When violinist Benjamin Beilman performs for the Candlelight Concert Society on Saturday, Nov. 10, at 8 p.m. at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre, he'll surely be one of the younger people in the house. That's because this 22-year-old Curtis Institute graduate is off to a precocious start with his professional career. Helping give him a boost are the performance prizes he has received from the Buffalo Chamber Music Society, Friends of Music Concerts in New York and Howard County's own Candlelight Concert Society.

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...

A Mass of Christian burial for Frank J. Smiraglia, a retired State Department employee and free-lance violinist, will be offered at 10 a.m. today at St. John the Evangelist Church, 10103 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring.A Silver Spring resident for nearly 40 years, Mr. Smiraglia died Wednesday at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring after suffering a heart attack six weeks earlier. He was 72.Born in Berwick, Pa., Mr. Smiraglia attended the George Washington University in Washington.He started working for the State Department in 1939 and retired in 1979 as a management analyst with the Bureau of European Affairs.

When violinist Benjamin Beilman performs for the Candlelight Concert Society on Saturday, Nov. 10, at 8 p.m. at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre, he'll surely be one of the younger people in the house. That's because this 22-year-old Curtis Institute graduate is off to a precocious start with his professional career. Helping give him a boost are the performance prizes he has received from the Buffalo Chamber Music Society, Friends of Music Concerts in New York and Howard County's own Candlelight Concert Society.

CHAMBER music can be an occasion for relaxation -- both for players and listeners -- but Beethoven's Sonata in C Minor for Violin and Piano should leave players and listeners as exhilarated and as wiped out as 30 minutes on a dance floor. It's nice to report that the performance of violinist Maria Bachmann and pianist Jon Klibonoff Saturday night in the Shriver Hall series had exactly that effect.From the opening measures of the piece, with its ominous and foreboding beginning, one knew that he was in the presence of first-class artists.

Annaliesa Place went for broke in her violin recital for the "Music in the Great Hall" series, gambling on two virtuoso, emotion-packed works that can test the greatest of fiddlers. The young player didn't exactly hit the jackpot, but she didn't lose her shirt, either. This recent degree-earner at Peabody Conservatory, where she won the Yale Gordon Concerto Competition, demonstrated poise and preparation during Sunday's concert. Her tone, given a resonant lift by the acoustics at Towson Unitarian Universalist Church, had a burnished quality, and her technique was up to most of the challenges.

Mintz with BSOWhen: Thursday and Friday at 8:15 p.m.Where: Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.Tickets: $15-$30.Call: (410) 783-8000. With his blond good looks, his scintillating virtuosity and his creamy tone, it's all too easy to think of Shlomo Mintz as the picture-book image of a popular violinist -- the kind of fiddler who perpetually trots out the masterpieces of Brahms, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to adoring audiences.Mintz, who performs Bruch's "Scottish Fantasy" with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this week, is indeed immensely popular.

On Sunday afternoon, a small, inner-city church offered a concert that would be the envy of any international concert stage. As part of its Lois J. Wright Memorial Concert Series, St. Katherine's presented Baltimore audiences with a gift in the form of the gleaming artistry of violinist Dylana Jenson.Ms. Jenson is, in fact, no stranger to the major concert halls of the world. While still a teen-ager, she won the Silver Medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and, after a triumphant Carnegie Hall debut, recorded the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata not only inspired the great piece of short fiction by Tolstoy that bears its name, but also a countless number of sexy perfume ads. The first movement, particularly, reaches an extraordinary (even for Beethoven) peak passion and fury. The way that violinist Pamela Frank and pianist Claude Frank performed this work Saturday night in the Shriver Hall Concert Series made it easy to understand why the deranged narrator of Tolstoy's novella says this music is dangerous and irrational and that it leads inevitably to adultery and murder.

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.

Updated: Baltimore City police sent out a release around 2:30 p.m. informing that Guadalupe Sosa and Michael Carter, the two Baltimore School for the Arts students who went missing Wednesday, have been found safe and unharmed.    Original Post: Baltimore school officials are spreading word that two students from the Baltimore School for the Arts left the school Wednesday morning, and to date have not been seen or heard from...

The last time Itzhak Perlman appeared with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a decade ago, he brought only his violin. For his return this weekend, he's bringing along a baton, too. It's not uncommon for soloists to feel the lure of the podium, but Perlman, one of the most popular violinists in the world, landed there more by chance. "The conducting bug never bit me," Perlman, 64, says. "My wife [Toby] started the Perlman Music Program for talented young string players 15 years ago. She told me one day, 'They need a coach.

The first time violinist James Ehnes visited Baltimore, it was to catch a game at Camden Yards. Don't hold it against him, but he was rooting for the Red Sox. He's been a fan since he was a kid, when his father would drive him to Boston from their home in Canada. "The highlight was going to Fenway Park," Ehnes says. This week, he'll try for a musical homer with his 1715 Stradivarius, playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. At his BSO debut in 2007, performing a Mozart concerto, Ehnes left quite an impression with his refined technique, sweet tone and elegant phrase-making.

A comment posted by a viewer on one of violinist Hilary Hahn's many YouTube videos sums up her appeal neatly: "You're just too cool, Hilary :)" The stellar 29-year-old fiddler, still based in Baltimore, where she grew up and started her musical training, has her own YouTube channel. It features informal Q&A sessions with viewers and disarming clips Hahn films in her dressing room or other spots when she's on the road. "I meet these neat people, and doing interviews is a way I get to know them," Hahn says from Vienna, Austria.

Leaning against a stool with his conductor's baton at the ready, Raffaele Faraco is leading his musicians through their first reading of a complicated Beethoven symphony. The 87-year-old former violinist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra interrupts the group repeatedly to offer suggestions. He jokes about his creaky bones and encourages them to "play music, not just the notes." And he pushes and prods his orchestra members - computer programmers, office secretaries, dietitians, court reporters and police dispatchers - to do better.

Albin J. Grden, a violinist, clarinetist and saxophonist who taught in Baltimore public schools for more than four decades and was a longtime member of the Baltimore City Municipal Park Band, died Aug. 30 of kidney failure at Oak Crest Village. He was 81. Mr. Grden was born in Baltimore into a musical family. His father, a Polish immigrant, played the violin, and his mother played and taught piano. "I guess Al started playing violin when he was 8 years old, and he'd practice, practice and practice," said a brother, Eugene C. Grden of White Hall.

If Dmitry Sitkovetsky concentrated on solo appearances as more conventional violin virtuosos do, it probably wouldn't have taken him 11 years to return to play with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.Sitkovetsky, who will perform tonight, Friday and Saturday evenings with the BSO and conductor David Lockington, is acknowledged by most of his colleagues to be one of the masters of his instrument -- the equal (and perhaps the superior) of such better-known fiddlers as Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman.

When a young violinist named Elissa Lee Kokkonen walked out on stage at Kraushaar Auditorium last night to play Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, I wracked my brain trying to remember why I had heard of her. It took only a few minutes of her playing to understand why.Although she may not now be as celebrated as some of her contemporaries, Kokkonen is one of the biggest violin talents I've heard in years. This Beethoven piece is the dragon at the gate of the violinist's concerto repertory, a profound and sublime work that defeats most of those who would challenge it. It's a work that denies its secrets to even the most experienced and gifted fiddle players.

Talk about momentum. Things couldn't move much faster, or more positively, at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where Marin Alsop is a few short weeks away from the history-making inauguration of her tenure as music director -- the first woman at the helm of a major American orchestra. Her interim term last season was eventful enough, what with such developments as the orchestra's first iTunes download (a chart-topper, at that). This season, Alsop and the BSO will make their satellite debut on XM Radio -- the opening program this month will be broadcast live, and there will be a regular Alsop/BSO presence on that channel thereafter.

Tao-Chang Yu, whose violin has taken him across three continents, almost became an electrical engineer. "The moment I decided this was what I wanted to do was after my father passed away when I was 19," Yu said. He made the right decision. On Saturday night, the sassy notes of "Carmen Fantasy" leapt off the strings of Yu's violin, captivating listeners and earning him the first-place $5,000 Rising Star Award at Howard County Arts Council's Celebration of the Arts. Yu said his father, a musician, conductor, and teacher, helped establish a school for musically gifted children in his native Taiwan.