Bernard Rands

More than most people, composers of modern concert music are likely to wonder at times what it's all for. Audiences are only intermittently comprehending. The money is awful, well-prepared performances infrequent. Yet Network for New Music's Sunday concert at Settlement Music School was full of compelling answers in its retrospective 20th-season and 70th-birthday celebration of composer Bernard Rands. The British-born, U.S.-based Rands has won all the big awards and continues receiving high-profile commissions, but hasn't dented the public consciousness nearly as much as post-minimalists and Eastern European mystics.

It could have been a Philadelphia Orchestra program - Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and the first performance of a new piece by Bernard Rands. But it was the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia premiering Rands' Requiescant Sunday night in a one-performance-only concert at the Academy of Music. Curiously, there was nothing in the Choral Arts program notes to explain that Rands was, until recently, the orchestra's composer in residence. The position was eliminated in a round of budget cuts last season.

Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich played new cello works by Bernard Rands and Augusta Read Thomas during a 70th birthday extravaganza earlier this month with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In the concert Wednesday, the composers and the symphony paid tribute to Rostropovich for his humanitarian efforts and also for his tireless advocacy and sponsorship of new music for cello. The works by Thomas and Rands may be the first by husband and wife to be premiered in the same concert.

Bernard Rands, composer-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1989, will give up the post at the end of the season. During a recent stint with the orchestra, Rands said he had meant to leave after four years, but had stayed at Wolfgang Sawallisch's urging to help the new music director get established. Whether Rands will be replaced by an orchestra administration seeking ways to reduce its operating budget is uncertain, but it seems unlikely. Joseph H. Kluger, the orchestra's president, said, "We are preparing a number of recommendations for the board of directors to consider at their May 5 meeting.

Bernard Rands, the Philadelphia Orchestra's new composer-in-residence, has been spied at the Academy of Music in recent weeks, where he has begun part- time office hours, or at his new pied-a-terre at the Academy House. The expatriate Briton is spending a few days a week here and the others with his family in Boston, where he also teaches composing seminars at Harvard University. As of last week, the composer - whose stocky bearing and craggy features reveal his Welsh roots - was still awaiting his furniture.

Bernard Rands' understanding of an orchestra's timbral possibilities is elegant and uncommonly assured. In Le Tambourin, Suites Nos. 1 and 2, which received its first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti last night, the orchestra is often employed en masse and used at forte dynamic levels, but with such a keen consideration for string, percussion and wind layerings that the effect is of transparency rather than heaviness of...

The Philadelphia Orchestra's new composer-in-residence, Bernard Rands, has had a busy week. In addition to performances by the orchestra of his two Le Tambourin suites during the weekend, Philadelphians had a chance to hear something of his approach to chamber music yesterday afternoon in a concert in the Academy of Music Ballroom by members of the orchestra. Composed in 1988, . . . in the receding mist . . . is one of several works by Rands that use the poetry of Samuel Beckett as a source of inspiration.

Bernard Rands, the Philadelphia Orchestra's composer-in-residence, has completed his first piece tailored to the orchestra, which is performing it in concerts tonight through Monday at the Academy of Music. Ceremonial 3 for Orchestra premiered in Carnegie Hall on Monday. It is, according to my colleague Daniel Webster, pungently and eloquently scored. Previous Rands compositions such as Canti di Soli and Madrigali also revel in transparent evocative sonorities, spurring one's interest in the new 12-minute overture.

The Philadelphia Orchestra will end its yearlong commemoration of the centennial of Paul Hindemith's birth with a bang. The orchestra yesterday announced plans for a mini-festival of special events illuminating the work of composer Hindemith, poet Walt Whitman and the relationship between poetry and song. The events grow out of the orchestra's forthcoming performances of Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, which was inspired by the Whitman poem of the same name.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's 1992-93 season will feature four conducting debuts, three world premieres and an emphasis on the heart of the symphonic repertoire. Though the orchestra has no official music director in this interim year, both laureate conductor Riccardo Muti and music director-designate Wolfgang Sawallisch have participated in planning the season schedule. Muti and Sawallisch will each conduct four season weeks, with Sawallisch also scheduled for opening night Sept.

The Curtis Institute of Music 's student recitals - on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays - start up again Oct. 12. Catch great talent before the rest of the world does. (215-893-5261 or www.curtis.edu .)         - P.D. Mendelssohn Club 's world premiere of David Lang's Battle Hymns was a hit during summer's Hidden City Festival, but this Oct. 17 reprise will afford a deeper look at this highly original music. The all-American program also has excerpts of Roberto Sierra's Missa Latina , to be premiered in full next year.

Composers often reach outside their own cultures for new creative vistas, from Beethoven's seizing upon trivial tunes as the basis for his Diabelli Variations to Paul Simon's drawing his best music from South African soil. Yet with composers John Harbison's and Bernard Rands' setting lesbian poets to music at Network for New Music's Sunday concert, the ultimate question - in this era of cultural ownership, when artistic communities reserve the right for special-interest groups to tell their own stories - isn't just about musical quality but making cross-cultural sense.

More than most people, composers of modern concert music are likely to wonder at times what it's all for. Audiences are only intermittently comprehending. The money is awful, well-prepared performances infrequent. Yet Network for New Music's Sunday concert at Settlement Music School was full of compelling answers in its retrospective 20th-season and 70th-birthday celebration of composer Bernard Rands. The British-born, U.S.-based Rands has won all the big awards and continues receiving high-profile commissions, but hasn't dented the public consciousness nearly as much as post-minimalists and Eastern European mystics.

Chamber music is normally synonymous with demure, intimate sounds - except at the Network for New Music. The Sunday concert at the Settlement Music School was a retrospective of sorts - prompted by a yet-to-be-recorded compact disc - featuring four previously premiered works by composers with one common characteristic: Talent for creating musical gestures far bigger, more colorful and varied than the means at hand would suggest. In wissahickon poeTrees, local composer Jennifer Higdon encompasses the four seasons in Wissahickon Park with six players on strings, winds and percussion, each switching among as many as three different instruments - including eerily humming water glasses and crotales (miniature cymbals)

Anni Baker, 55, a former Broadway and classical singer whose work with composers helped to fatten the contemporary-music catalog, died yesterday at her Philadelphia home after a 5 1/2-year struggle with breast cancer. Under the name Annie Rachel, she performed in lead and supporting roles in Broadway and off-Broadway productions. She worked in Las Vegas, opening for Gordon MacRae, Forrest Tucker and Joe Williams, and appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Mike Douglas Show, The Merv Griffin Show, Today, and Arthur Godfrey's radio show.

The first time somebody cried listening to a piece by Jennifer Higdon, the composer thought that the woman must be weary, or that it was a fluke. That happened five years ago, during a performance of Higdon's Voices, a string quartet. Since then, she's gotten more accustomed to her music's provoking visible emotion. I spied a few eye-swipers myself this fall during the Philadelphia Singers' premiere of Higdon's Southern Grace. "I used to be surprised. . . . Now I consider it the best compliment in the world," Higdon says.

It could have been a Philadelphia Orchestra program - Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and the first performance of a new piece by Bernard Rands. But it was the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia premiering Rands' Requiescant Sunday night in a one-performance-only concert at the Academy of Music. Curiously, there was nothing in the Choral Arts program notes to explain that Rands was, until recently, the orchestra's composer in residence. The position was eliminated in a round of budget cuts last season.

Atmospherics were the focus of the Network for New Music program Sunday at the Settlement Music School, but they were atmospherics realized from varied artistic standpoints. Takemitsu and Thomas Whitman, Dallapiccola and Rands all offered music that implied skies and oceans, fields and misty woods. Two other works - by Michael Colgrass and Mark Phillips - provided bold concerto-like pieces for the ensemble's gifted players. Phillips' Sonic Landscapes placed tangible oboist Richard Woodhams with an intangible taped electronic ensemble in a five-section display of the solo instrument's full capacities.

Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich played new cello works by Bernard Rands and Augusta Read Thomas during a 70th birthday extravaganza earlier this month with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In the concert Wednesday, the composers and the symphony paid tribute to Rostropovich for his humanitarian efforts and also for his tireless advocacy and sponsorship of new music for cello. The works by Thomas and Rands may be the first by husband and wife to be premiered in the same concert.

Bernard Rands, composer-in-residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1989, will give up the post at the end of the season. During a recent stint with the orchestra, Rands said he had meant to leave after four years, but had stayed at Wolfgang Sawallisch's urging to help the new music director get established. Whether Rands will be replaced by an orchestra administration seeking ways to reduce its operating budget is uncertain, but it seems unlikely. Joseph H. Kluger, the orchestra's president, said, "We are preparing a number of recommendations for the board of directors to consider at their May 5 meeting.