Conductor

A lawyer for Delaware County says she was thrown beneath a moving SEPTA train Monday when it pulled out of the Eddystone station before she had fully gotten off. Patricia Biswanger, 55, of Bryn Mawr, said two cars of the train passed over her as she lay in the gravel train bed between the platform and the rails. "It was terrifying. All I'm thinking is, 'What is it going to feel like when this train hits me? When is the pain going to start?' " Biswanger said Wednesday. Biswanger called a friend, Francie Howat, the Eddystone borough manager, who notified local police.

If the Curtis Institute is about achieving greatness in various forms, an essential part of that would have to be experiencing the pitfalls that are everywhere in the symphonic repertoire. Nothing dire happened when the Curtis Symphony Orchestra played Jennifer Higdon, Brahms, and Bartok under Robert Spano Monday at the Kimmel Center; the showcase element of the concert was delivered with swaggering confidence. But that doesn't mean any given masterpiece's DNA was located. The Bartok Concerto for Orchestra was most distinctive: Rather than running the movements together as so many conductors do, Spano treated them as discrete entities in ways that reminded you of the music's strangeness, how movements start in mid-thought and end in ways suggesting that there's plenty left to say. Spano pursued a great variety of string sounds.

When Philadelphia Singers founder and music director Michael Korn died in 1991 at age 44, no one could imagine the group continuing. But it did; in fact, his successor, David Hayes, has now been at the helm longer than Korn was. And as Hayes clocks more than two decades in the job, he is asking the board to start envisioning a future without him. Hayes told his singers Monday night that the 2014-15 season will be his last. A search committee for his successor will be formed, a board member said.

Any longtime observer of Ignat Solzhenitsyn knows he has two distinct musical personalities depending on whether he's conducting or at the keyboard. Seldom have the differences been so apparent in the same concert - making the conductor laureate's return to the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia Monday at the Kimmel Center a richer-than-usual experience. The double personality isn't unusual. Christoph Eschenbach is a dapper classicist at the keyboard and anything but that when conducting.

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?

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - The first two cars were packed as usual for the morning rush, so tightly that people stood pressed flesh to flesh, sandwiched between bicycles and the few seats, many without so much as a strap to hold on to. This train didn't lurch, though. It had trouble stopping at all, overshooting platform after platform and missing at least one station entirely as it rushed toward the end of the line. The train didn't come to a halt until it had slammed into a metal barrier at Buenos Aires' Once station.

At the Mann Center, where rehearsal time for Philadelphia Orchestra concerts sometimes is frustratingly short, evidence of guest conductors' putting a personal imprint on repertoire can be elusive. The challenge multiplies in works so popular that a large percentage of the audience can whistle the start of the development section.   Individuality, though, promises to shine through standard repertoire in the first-of-the-summer Mann orchestral concerts. Xian Zhang, the young Chinese American conductor now based in Milan, leads the Philadelphia Orchestra Wednesday night in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor.

WHEN I learned that information taken from Osama bin Laden's recently confiscated hard drive indicated that trains in the U.S. were being targeted, it reminded me of a chilling situation that I experienced late last year. On the morning of Nov. 30, I took the Chestnut Hill East Regional Rail to Center City for a hair appointment. As usual, I got on the train at the Mount Airy station, in the northwest section of the city. I chose my seat and gazed out the window, anticipating my gray roots being covered - yet again.

Classical warhorse repertoire needs to be programmed with the utmost care so as not to wind up in the glue factory - Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 ("New World") being a case in point. Though hardly the composer's best (that distinction falls to Symphony No. 7 ), the second-movement tune made it the victim of its own product placement in any number of commercials and films. Will we ever hear it with fresh ears? The Philadelphia Orchestra's guest conductor, Marin Alsop, gave the piece an optimum platform Thursday at the Kimmel Center by placing it alongside its grandchildren.

Some conductors can go home again, seeming to pick up where they left off with an ex-orchestra months or years after relinquishing a music directorship. But nothing so simple unfolded when pianist/conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn returned to the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, which he developed over many years before becoming conductor laureate this season. The old relationship seemed to be waning: In the ultra-clear acoustic of the Temple Performing Arts Center, Tuesday's concert lacked the meticulousness of years past, and not just with ill-tuned chords in the orchestra.