Conductor

BOSTON had pops emissary Arthur Fiedler in charge for a phenomenal 50 years, New York its "easy listening" innovator Andre Kostelanetz for many a moon. And here in Philadelphia, for the last 34 years, Peter Nero has been the conductor/pianist likewise synomous with pops concerts - the populist end of live symphonic music - as the founding conductor and musical director of the Philly Pops orchestra. The time has come for a changing of the guard, though. Two weeks ago, Michael Krajewski - the congenial, 62-year-old "new kid" in town - was leading the Philly Pops at the Kimmel Center, introducing the music and comically interacting with the audience during the Pops run of spy-tacular movie themes, "Bond and Beyond.

Hugo Fiorato, 97, a former child prodigy who became the conductor of the New York City Ballet and one of its most enduring influences, died last Monday in Boston. His death was confirmed by a stepson, Jonathan Scott. Mr. Fiorato, who was with the City Ballet for 56 years, was a figure of continuity surpassed only by George Balanchine, who founded it in 1948 with Mr. Fiorato's mentor, conductor Leon Barzin. Mr. Fiorato held almost every job the company had to offer, starting as its first concertmaster in 1948.

Encore Series Inc., presenter of the Philly Pops, has hired a successor to its founding music director, Peter Nero. Michael Krajewski, 62, who leads pops orchestras in Atlanta, Houston, and Jacksonville, Fla., will take over in the fall of 2013. Public acknowledgment of the decision was made Tuesday at City Hall by Mayor Nutter, who called Krajewski "one of the world's foremost conductors. " Nutter took the opportunity to tip his hat to Nero - who did not attend the announcement - "for his contribution to the arts.

For once, James Conlon seemed like a conductor without a cause. No Holocaust composers or underappreciated Zemlinsky masterworks were on his Philadelphia Orchestra program Thursday, just Mozart and Dvorak that had connections with the great city of Prague. Still, the charismatic Conlon revealed himself as an incurable egghead. The real theme of the program was the key of D minor - the one Mozart saved for dread of the supernatural, whether the sea god Poseidon or Don Giovanni's murder victim returning from the dead.

With no conductor for Thursday night's Philadelphia Orchestra concert, the ensemble was left to confront Mozart on its own. Little surprise that the Eine kleine Nachtmusik was small and bland, the Symphony No. 25 erratic. And yet, the composer's C Minor Piano Concerto glowed with a point of view of such blinding beauty that we probably won't hear its likes again anytime soon. It was all planned, actually - even rehearsed that way. Conductors are a relatively modern invention, especially the breed of whom celebrity is expected, and for this one program the orchestra constructed a concert that asked musicians to find leadership elsewhere.

James DePreist, 76, the distinguished conductor and educator, died Friday, Feb. 9, at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., of complications from a heart attack last spring, his agent said. Born in Philadelphia, the nephew of the famed contralto Marian Anderson, Mr. DePreist became early in his career something that is still a rarity today: an African American conductor leading top-tier orchestras. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

Tours are tough for most symphony orchestras. But for the London Symphony Orchestra, tours are a break from a hectic schedule of recording film scores and preparing a full symphonic program that's performed only once or twice. So if playing Mahler's five-movement Symphony No. 7 under Valery Gergiev at the Kimmel Center on Tuesday was a relatively light day, it showed in the confidence with which the orchestra played music that lashes out in multiple directions - and in the dignity that brought to Gergiev's mercurial tendencies.

I RIDE SEPTA's regional-rail system. The trains are clean enough and mostly on time.Conductors are polite and helpful, give or take a grump. So, I wasn't sure what to make of the clown of a conductor I came across the other night. Was he some jokester? A jerk? A disgruntled employee? I'm thinking all three. You tell me. I stepped onto the 6:43 p.m. Chestnut Hill West train from Market East and nearly plowed into the woman in front of me. Before I could give her the "tourist much?"

When a major symphony orchestra conductor has a last-minute illness, a shudder ripples through the classical-music world, followed by the potentially terrifying question: Where to find a replacement? Absent soloists can be covered by a change of repertoire, but conductors are some of the most densely scheduled people on Earth. These peripatetic beings are lucky just to arrive on time for long-scheduled engagements - forget filling in for felled colleagues. Yes, there are staff conductors, but apparently none was available last fall when Riccardo Muti had to bow out of a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert - leaving violin soloist Anne Sophie Mutter to conduct herself.

Sometimes, the Philadelphia Orchestra needs an outsider to remind it of who it is and what it was. Gianandrea Noseda - a guest conductor so popular with the orchestra that he was reengaged for a two-week stint this season starting Thursday (with other return visits in the works) - happens to be the foremost Rachmaninoff specialist of his generation. This week, he's conducting that composer's Symphony No. 2 Thursday through Saturday at the Kimmel Center with what is generally considered to be "Rachmaninoff's orchestra.

If a night at the orchestra were a pure investment-return transaction, Lang Lang certainly gave Thursday's audience its money's worth. It's when the actual music entered the equation that things got a little dicey. You had to look past a lot to hear it. At the front of Verizon Hall stage, with Simon Rattle leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist air-conducted or air-trilled with an idle hand when Beethoven failed to give him enough to do, mugged all manner of facial expressions, and kept leaning out to look at the audience, as if to ask: Do you like this?

Joseph J. McKelvie, 99, of Philadelphia, a well-known conductor on the Reading Railroad for many years, died Friday, April 19, of congestive heart failure at his home in Las Vegas. He had gone there last year to be near family. From 1939 to 1975, when he retired, Mr. McKelvie was a familiar figure on the Hatboro and Lansdale lines of the Reading Co. and on the "Crusader" and "Wall Street" express trains to North Jersey, from which commuters took a ferry to Manhattan, said his son, John Joseph.

If Wagner's music is as addictive as many say it is, the rehab centers are going to be jammed with Curtis Institute students after a Wagner-overdose concert Sunday at the Kimmel Center, aided by vocal performances from Heidi Melton and Eric Owens that the Metropolitan Opera's current Ring cycle would be lucky to have. Led by guest conductor Mark Russell Smith, the Curtis Symphony Orchestra excerpted five operas over 21/2 hours, playing with a muscularity that creating tsunamis of Wagnerian sound.

BOSTON had pops emissary Arthur Fiedler in charge for a phenomenal 50 years, New York its "easy listening" innovator Andre Kostelanetz for many a moon. And here in Philadelphia, for the last 34 years, Peter Nero has been the conductor/pianist likewise synomous with pops concerts - the populist end of live symphonic music - as the founding conductor and musical director of the Philly Pops orchestra. The time has come for a changing of the guard, though. Two weeks ago, Michael Krajewski - the congenial, 62-year-old "new kid" in town - was leading the Philly Pops at the Kimmel Center, introducing the music and comically interacting with the audience during the Pops run of spy-tacular movie themes, "Bond and Beyond.

SEPTA conductors and assistant conductors have rejected a tentative contract. SEPTA's board was scheduled to approve the contract Thursday, if the members of United Transportation Union Local 61 had ratified it. Now, the two sides will resume negotiations. The union represents 396 conductors and assistant conductors, whose last contract expired on Oct. 17, 2009. Two other of SEPTA's 17 bargaining units also remain without contracts: the unions representing locomotive engineers and electrical workers.

SEPTA has reached a tentative contract with the labor union representing Regional Rail conductors and assistant conductors. The agreement calls for raises totaling 11.5 percent over the five-year life of the contract, similar to the pattern established by a 2009 contract with SEPTA's largest union, Transport Workers Union Local 234, which represents bus and subway operators and mechanics. The tentative agreement with 390 conductors and assistant conductors must still be ratified by the members of United Transportation Union Local 61 and the SEPTA board.

With the orchestral repertoire as wide and deep as the sea, orchestras don't need to go out and borrow pieces from other realms. But some melodies are too good to pass up, and so the Philadelphia Orchestra reached into chamber music for Friday afternoon's concert, returning with a transcription of Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence . The appeal is obvious: you can whistle every tune. The transcription - by double-bass pedagogue Lucas Drew, presumably to give his instrument a part where there was none - is a fine one, billowing up string sextet into string orchestra.

Peter Nero has given listeners a lot of improvisation in the last three-plus decades. An instinctive showman and unlikely keyboard embodiment of jazz and classical traditions, Nero has constructed concerts with the Philly Pops without committing to a printed program of pieces. The mix could change from night to night - though you could always count on him to send you home with Sousa's "Liberty Bell March" in your ear and his own zany hand gestures dancing in your head. What can Philly Pops fans expect from Michael Krajewski?

After a career that brought him to orchestra podiums in Helsinki, Finland; Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Los Angeles, James Anderson DePreist was memorialized Monday near 19th and Fitzwater Streets in South Philadelphia at his boyhood church, steps from his onetime home. "Jimmy was the prince of our family," cousin Sandra Grymes said of DePreist, who died Feb. 8 at age 76. He lost his father at age 6, she told the gathering of about 80 friends and family members at Union Baptist Church, and was raised by women who were "able to make space for him to do his own thing.

Wolfgang Sawallisch, 89, the German maestro who defied expectations by taking the helm of the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 70 and remaking it into perhaps the most assured blend of orchestral polish and power in the United States, died Friday evening at home in Grassau outside Munich, according to a statement from the Bavarian State Opera. He had been stricken in recent years by a number of diseases and conditions. Mr. Sawallisch, only the orchestra's sixth music director in a century, succeeded the dashing, controversial Riccardo Muti in 1993.