Youth Symphony

The Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra performs holiday music 3 p.m. Saturday at the Annapolis Area Christian School, 109 Burns Crossing Road in Severn. Admission is free. Call 443-758-3157 for more information.

Arne Running, music director of the Swarthmore College Orchestra and former conductor of the Jenkintown Music School Chamber Orchestra, has been named music director of the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra.Running, 48, succeeds Karen Deal, the CYSO's founding conductor who recently became the assistant conductor of the Nashville Symphony.About to enter its third season, the CYSO, has quickly become one of the area's major musical organizations. The 60-member orchestra draws young musicians from Anne Arundel County, southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore.

The Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra, in only its fourth year, already is planning a European tour.The orchestra is scheduled to spend two weeks next June touring the Czech Republic and Slovakia.The members will lodge with their counterparts overseas as part of a cultural exchange. The tour tentatively will take the musicians to concerts in Prague, Bratislava and Brno.Maestro Arne Running, the Philadelphia clarinetist and conductor who is starting his second season with the orchestra, already is planning a program that will include the "New World Symphony" of Dvorak and Smetana's "The Moldau," two masterworks by Czech composers who continue to warm the hearts of their countrymen today.

When the Chesapeake Youth Symphony opened for business five years ago, it consisted of 35 youngsters playing in a single orchestra.The organization has grown to three full ensembles of 150 talented young musicians from Anne Arundel County, the Eastern Shore and the Baltimore and Washington suburbs.All three -- the CYSO, the intermediate level CYSO Repertory Orchestra and the CYSO String Orchestra -- were on display at Francis Scott Key Auditorium on the campus of St. John's College in Annapolis Saturday night as the young people's symphony of Anne Arundel County celebrated its fifth anniversary.

The year may be new, but one of its most important debuts will take place tomorrow evening.Arne Running, the recently appointed conductor of the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra, takes the podium for his first full-length concert at Key Auditorium on the campus of St. John's College. The program will include works by Sibelius, Bizet and Mendelssohn.Mr. Running, 48, music director of the Swarthmore College Orchestra of Pennsylvania, was selected from among 50 applicants last August to succeed Karen Deal, the CYSO's founding conductor.

When David Choo decided to end his five-year tenure as conductor of the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra last season, the music world took notice. Fifty-two conductors from 21 states and three foreign countries (Britain, Italy and Austria) submitted applications to the orchestra's search committee for the job of conducting one of Maryland's premier young people's orchestras, said Robert Posten, a professional trombonist and CYSO parent who headed the group. The committee selected Julien Benichou, a French-born maestro who has trained under of Gustav Meier of Baltimore's Peabody Institute, one of the world's most renowned nurturers of young conducting talent.

A program of opera favorites being performed on the Maryland Hall stage is hardly news. What is out of the ordinary is that the accompanying ensemble will be the talented young musicians of the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra. For the first time, the CYSO will be an opera orchestra, says Julien Benichou, the French-born, Baltimore-based conductor in his first year as music director of one of Maryland's premiere youth orchestras. "I think it's very nice for kids to accompany singers," Benichou says.

A program of opera favorites being performed on the Maryland Hall stage is hardly news. What is out of the ordinary is that the accompanying ensemble will be the talented young musicians of the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra. For the first time, the CYSO will be an opera orchestra, says Julien Benichou, the French-born, Baltimore-based conductor in his first year as music director of one of Maryland's premiere youth orchestras. "I think it's very nice for kids to accompany singers," Benichou says.

I came away from the Mother's Day-eve concert by the Chesapeake Youth Symphony Orchestra with very positive impressions of conductor Mark Allen McCoy and his players.Still in his rookie season at the orchestra's helm, McCoy has his musicians playing with an impressive awareness of the beauty of the music. When gorgeous themes and passages full of character flow by, the automatic pilot is seldom, if ever, engaged.You could hear this sensitivity at work as the small but valiant cello section worked its way through the expansive opening phrases of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony with such diligence and attention to detail.

The Chesapeake Youth Symphony began with one orchestra, one gifted conductor and a master plan fashioned by community leaders intent on giving talented young musicians the opportunity to play demanding symphonic repertoire in the most supportive artistic environment possible. Ten years later, the CYSO, with no fewer than four ensembles under its organizational aegis, will celebrate the decade with a season-ending concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis.