Spring Arts - Classical Music:

The Kimmel Center is presenting less expensive, less exotic visiting orchestras. Local ensembles are increasing collaborations, so that the same event does double or triple duty by counting as a concert in the brochures of multiple organizations. And the city's musical face to the larger world, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has been in bankruptcy more than nine months and doesn't hope to exit until sometime after the filing's first anniversary.

Times are tough. Young artists from the Curtis Institute of Music are leaving the nest and heading into careers of equal parts risk and promise. The orchestra and Kimmel are (once again) looking at merger. Change, once believed a passing factor, now seems a permanent force.

But our town's artistic spirit is a plucky one. Substance lies beneath all the reconfiguring, repackaging and corporate reorganization. New music is abundant. Perhaps most promising of all is the near-universal realization that, while partnering is efficient and effective marketing can boost ticket sales, classical music needs to think long-term. Two new serious after-school programs - Tune Up Philly and Play On, Philly! - represent the first critical steps toward rebuilding an egalitarian musical infrastructure for the city's youth (and thus, one day, audiences).

There's much to listen for this spring - and here my colleague David Patrick Stearns and I give you some of our choices - but to a lot of ears, there's no sweeter sound than the first scratchy tries at putting bow to string.

- Peter Dobrin, Inquirer music critic

Spring Arts - Classical Music: Great music uplifts in times of change

Dolce Suono Ensemble: "Mahler 100/Schoenberg 60" (Haverford College, Feb. 3; Trinity Center, Feb. 5) This year's second installment of the Mahler/Schoenberg project goes deeper: Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and a new companion piece by Shulamit Ran, Moon Songs. Few pieces have changed the world as much as Pierrot, which depicts an unhinged mind with explosive atonality and a vocal style between singing and chanting. Modern-music specialist Lucy Shelton solos. (267-252-1803, www.mimistillman.org)