Boston Symphony Orchestra

When the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 last spring, its leaders said the reorganization would cost $2.9 million in legal and administrative fees, and they predicted the orchestra would be out of bankruptcy in the latter part of 2011. The legal tab now looks likely to be triple that initial estimate, and the case is entering its second year. On April 16, 2011, the ensemble's 75-member board voted - with a few abstentions, and all five musicians on the board voting "no" - to become the first major U.S. orchestra to file for bankruptcy.

The opening of this week's Tanglewood Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was available in radio broadcasts for those of us unable to get there. And though the audio-only aspect of radio is far from the experience of being there, microphones don't lie in live broadcasts. Charles Dutoit stepped in for the indisposed James Levine with a modified grab-bag program that included repertoire as far flung as Respighi's tone poem The Pines of Rome , and, more significantly, Act I of Bellini's Norma , starring Academy of Vocal Arts graduate Angela Meade.

Grace Stevens Hobson Smith, 97, a retired elementary school teacher and music educator who began giving piano lessons when she was a teenager, died of complications from a stroke Monday at her home in Germantown. By the age of 10, Mrs. Smith was playing the piano and providing music for her Sunday school class. By 14, she had her own students, charging 50 cents per lesson. Over the next six decades, Mrs. Smith toured with a piano ensemble, studied music in Germany, and used her experiences to illuminate the music for her students.

Composer Hector Berlioz signified many things, but on Thursday at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, he was the patron saint of young conductors. The artist in question was Ludovic Morlot, the young associate conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who is accumulating prestigious debuts, among them his first outing with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Berlioz overture, Le Corsaire , with its long opening string flourishes, seizes your attention dramatically - at least when well played - and assures you that you're not likely to forget the visual image of the conductor making it happen.

The orchestra world is full of experts who, on a single hearing, will give you a full assessment of what's right and what's wrong between an ensemble and its conductor. If the Philadelphia Orchestra's most recent U.S. tour and my experiencing it only as a far-away reader of reviews was instructive about anything, it's that one-night diagnoses are a dangerous way to make a living. We in the classical realm tend to praise the excitement of live music and the way performances change from one night to the next - and then fail to take into consideration that performances change from one night to the next.

Right now, there may be no American orchestra better poised for greatness than the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The ensemble has managed to snag James Levine as its next music director, its home is one of the acoustical marvels of the world, and the group's leaders have socked away an enormous endowment. No other orchestra can boast these three important assets, and if Levine's chemistry has the same power in Boston it has had elsewhere, get ready to hear this orchestra leapfrog to the front of the pack.

Outside Carnegie Hall, people begged vehemently for tickets: The city's favorite resident conductor, James Levine, was celebrating the beginning of his tenure with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Mahler's Symphony No. 8, and the Monday concert promised to achieve historic status. Furthermore, the symphony itself is the composer's least-heard, if only because it's large and expensive: Carnegie Hall lost 170 seats to make way for the 327 instrumentalists and choristers. Expectations ran so high - after all, this is the orchestra for which Levine is giving up his European career - that the concert was all but getting good reviews before the first note.

Pity the fool listener who tries to assess from a single concert the condition of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the state of its relationship with Christoph Eschenbach. On Monday, the orchestra and its music director leave for two weeks of concerts in Germany, Switzerland and England - important performances at prestigious European music festivals, where critics, managers and other artists will form judgments to last years. Let's hope the orchestra has a string of good nights.

In Western Massachusetts, the hills really are alive with the sound of music. At least they are when Tanglewood, one of the world's premier music festivals and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is open for the season. Nestled in the serene beauty of the Berkshire Hills, in the quintessentially New England town of Lenox, Mass., Tanglewood is 50 or more mostly classical concerts spread over nine weeks from July 1 through Labor Day weekend. Lenox is New England at its most postcard-perfect.

The Philadelphia Orchestra Association has made incremental but encouraging progress in the campaign to finance its reorganization and operations for several years beyond an expected exit from bankruptcy. But it still has a "mountain of money" to raise. About $35.5 million has been committed in gifts and pledges on the way to an immediate goal of $44 million, orchestra chairman Richard B. Worley said Monday. In addition to previously announced gifts from the William Penn Foundation and other local philanthropists, the orchestra has nailed down two anonymous donations totaling $5.5 million, $1 million from Dorrance Hill Hamilton, and gifts from 50 members of its own board.

When the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 last spring, its leaders said the reorganization would cost $2.9 million in legal and administrative fees, and they predicted the orchestra would be out of bankruptcy in the latter part of 2011. The legal tab now looks likely to be triple that initial estimate, and the case is entering its second year. On April 16, 2011, the ensemble's 75-member board voted - with a few abstentions, and all five musicians on the board voting "no" - to become the first major U.S. orchestra to file for bankruptcy.

The Philadelphia Orchestra Association has made incremental but encouraging progress in the campaign to finance its reorganization and operations for several years beyond an expected exit from bankruptcy. But it still has a "mountain of money" to raise. About $35.5 million has been committed in gifts and pledges on the way to an immediate goal of $44 million, orchestra chairman Richard B. Worley said Monday. In addition to previously announced gifts from the William Penn Foundation and other local philanthropists, the orchestra has nailed down two anonymous donations totaling $5.5 million, $1 million from Dorrance Hill Hamilton, and gifts from 50 members of its own board.

The opening of this week's Tanglewood Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was available in radio broadcasts for those of us unable to get there. And though the audio-only aspect of radio is far from the experience of being there, microphones don't lie in live broadcasts. Charles Dutoit stepped in for the indisposed James Levine with a modified grab-bag program that included repertoire as far flung as Respighi's tone poem The Pines of Rome , and, more significantly, Act I of Bellini's Norma , starring Academy of Vocal Arts graduate Angela Meade.

Although James Levine barely made it through his 40th anniversary season at the Metropolitan Opera, he did so with his stature undiminished. What a relief. Think of the embarrassment factor had his chronic health problems taken him out completely, at a time when this critical mass of Leviniana is arriving from all sides. On Wednesday, the American Masters profile, "James Levine: America's Maestro," airs on PBS (WHYY TV12, 8 p.m.), while six area movie theaters host the Met's encore simulcast of the Levine-conducted Die Walküre . Meanwhile, a coffee-table book, James Levine: 40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera (Amadeus Press, $32)

If career narratives unfolded with unerring justice, Ann Hobson Pilot would have been ours for the last five decades. But as it was, after being introduced to the instrumental love of her life, the harp, at Girls High and the deepening of her studies at Settlement Music School, Pilot left Philadelphia for the Cleveland Institute of Music. She substituted for the Pittsburgh Symphony, and became principal harpist of the National Symphony. But the chief beneficiary of her talent was the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which she joined in 1969.

The definition of a great conductor will always be someone who can set revelatory ideas on an ensemble able to take that vision and soar. But at this point in the evolution of American orchestras and their audiences, the successful conductor is someone who can connect with listeners on a number of levels outside of, well, listening. Michael Tilson Thomas was the embodiment of the extra-musical connection long before it became an institutional survival strategy. Envied at one end of the generational scale for consorting with Metallica and the Grateful Dead at his own band, the San Francisco Symphony, and adored at the other end because his Yiddish-theater grandparents played cards with Gershwin's parents, MTT (as he is called in the industry)

The orchestra world is full of experts who, on a single hearing, will give you a full assessment of what's right and what's wrong between an ensemble and its conductor. If the Philadelphia Orchestra's most recent U.S. tour and my experiencing it only as a far-away reader of reviews was instructive about anything, it's that one-night diagnoses are a dangerous way to make a living. We in the classical realm tend to praise the excitement of live music and the way performances change from one night to the next - and then fail to take into consideration that performances change from one night to the next.

Composer Hector Berlioz signified many things, but on Thursday at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, he was the patron saint of young conductors. The artist in question was Ludovic Morlot, the young associate conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who is accumulating prestigious debuts, among them his first outing with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Berlioz overture, Le Corsaire , with its long opening string flourishes, seizes your attention dramatically - at least when well played - and assures you that you're not likely to forget the visual image of the conductor making it happen.

Pity the fool listener who tries to assess from a single concert the condition of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the state of its relationship with Christoph Eschenbach. On Monday, the orchestra and its music director leave for two weeks of concerts in Germany, Switzerland and England - important performances at prestigious European music festivals, where critics, managers and other artists will form judgments to last years. Let's hope the orchestra has a string of good nights.