Music

MY HUSBAND and I were recently treated to a trip to Philadelphia by our children for our 30th anniversary. We stayed at the Sofitel. We took walks and went to Rittenhouse Square. I live in a suburb of Baltimore, Md., and was so impressed by this park. How wonderful it was. very diverse and lovely. We especially enjoyed the music. We enjoyed it so much that we stayed for over an hour to listen. We were told there was a clamor to get the music stopped. Please don't let them do this.

The often-fruitful marriage between music and poetry hits potentially fascinating snags with Philip Levine. The so-called working man's poet - whose expansive verses are filled with visions of Detroit in the snow and the sounds of Charlie Parker - is the focal point of The Crossing's Month of Moderns festival, which begins Sunday. The choir's ultra-literate founder/director Donald Nally seeks out combustible pairings of words and composer. Few poems, however, are as sturdy and self-sufficient as Levine's, which have won the Pulitzer Prize and any number of other awards.

"August Rush" is a would-be fairy tale about an orphan who follows his own drummer, his own cellist, and his own guitarist to a reunion with his musician parents. It has a clunky tone that teeters between musical mysticism and a much grittier account of life on the New York streets, where the boy goes to find his folks. It's directed by Kristen Sheridan, Jamey's kid, and she no doubt got this job for her role in blending the magical with the real in the wonderful immigrant saga "In America.

First the Music, Then the Words By Riccardo Muti Afterword by Marco Grondona Translated from the Italian by Alta L. Price Rizzoli. 243 pp. $29.95 Reviewed by Daniel Webster When Riccardo Muti, his transformational years with the Philadelphia Orchestra explosively behind him, strode to the podium of Italy's La Scala opera house in 1986, musicians and listeners alike cheered that Il Sceriffo , as an Italian newspaper dubbed him, had come. The avenging sheriff he was, the enforcer, almost alone among peers, his six-shooters aimed at those who sang the high E-flat instead of the B-flat Verdi had written, and at directors and singers who wanted to "improve" any operatic ür-text.

Despite the hot weather, the sixth annual Singer/Songwriter Weekend at Penn's Landing went ahead as scheduled over the weekend with a wide variety of music. Yesterday was the swan song.

The music was in the open air behind the Upper Merion Township Building on Sunday. It was the King of Prussia Folk Festival.

Penn's Landing plays host to the First Union Jam on the River, a three-day festival to launch the summer season with music. Concerts scheduled for today and tomorrow include Los Lobos and Bo Didley.

Musical scores are crucial to a host of TV series, but no other show uses background music as extensively as Criminal Minds . It can make a scary serial killer almost unbearably stomach-turning, or transform a brightly lit police station into midnight at Dracula's castle. The show's cues, which is what TV and film people call the individual sequences that play as scenes unfold, may lack the lyrics and catchy melodies of the songs on Glee , and they may not sound like music to most viewers, but they can help define character and mood as much as anything that appears on the screen.

When Witold Lutoslawski arrived in Philadelphia nearly seven years ago, he opened a musical window that Philadelphians scarcely knew existed. The composer's music had rarely been performed here, and the drama of his life and the growing impact of his music had been sensed mostly in Europe. That year, he was making it his mission to let Americans hear his music, and he took the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra with the assurance of a prince-regent looking out on a public soon to be his own. His presence that spring was so vivid and his music so distinctive that his death Monday in Warsaw at the age of 81 seemed disputable.

Pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who has acted as principal conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia since 1998, will take over the post of music director next season. Solzhenitsyn becomes only the second music director in the ensemble's 39-year history, taking over from founder Marc Mostovoy, who will serve as senior adviser to the orchestra. "I am honored by the Chamber Orchestra board's confidence in me," Solzhenitsyn said yesterday. "We are united in our aim to strengthen our position as a world-class chamber orchestra, and I am excited about taking on the additional responsibilities of music director as we strive toward that goal.