Orchestra

The Philadelphia Orchestra has satisfied the terms of a major challenge grant, triggering a $10 million gift and pushing the orchestra's campaign for its endowment past the $100 million mark. The orchestra will receive $10 million from the Neubauer Family Foundation - now that the orchestra has raised an additional $10 million from various donors and $10 million from its own board. The Neubauer money puts the total raised for the endowment campaign at $100,800,000. The current goal is $125 million - "though I'd like to see us blow past that," said Julie D?az, the orchestra's vice president of development.

The Philadelphia Orchestra announced yesterday that it had received a $3 million challenge grant from the William Penn Foundation, the first gift from a major Philadelphia foundation for the proposed $95 million concert hall. "It's a very significant sign," said Peter Wyeth, director of development for the orchestra. The foundation grant, he said, gave the concert-hall project "the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. " According to a statement by Bernard C. Watson, president of the William Penn Foundation, the grant "reflects our belief that the concert hall project is an extremely important one for Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Orchestra takes its case to the people tomorrow, beginning a three-week, cross-country, sea-to-sea tour. But despite all the departure hoopla scheduled at Philadelphia International Airport - balloons, a brass quintet playing Sousa marches, and a speech by music director Riccardo Muti - the orchestra will board its plane wondering if this may be the end of a format, the last flight into the sunset, the twilight of a 70-year-old tradition....

The two Kimmel Center resident organizations will combine their operational functions, though each will remain a separate nonprofit entity with their own board of directors. The public may see little change in the near-term, though crossmarketing and cost savings will eventually benefit both organizations. "Only about 6 percent of the audience attends both orchestras, so there is plenty of opportunity," said outgoing orchestra association president Joseph Kluger. "The Pops budget is about $4 million, a tenth of ours, but by combined saving on administration, ticketing, fund-raising and other matters, the number of Pops performances may be able to increase.

The Philadelphia Orchestra will perform three neighborhood concerts this summer. Once again, all are free. Continuing a practice that started regularly in 2000, the orchestra will trade its downtown venue for area neighborhoods. This year's concerts will be on Penn's Landing, in Camden's Whitman Park, and at Montgomery County Community College. The program will differ slightly for each concert, but all three will include Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, Bernstein's "Overture" to Candide, and the "Symphonic Dances" from West Side Story.

Our Philadelphia Orchestra has garnered many historic firsts, and tomorrow night adds a cosmic one: the first symphony orchestra represented in space. The occasion is the 100th space shuttle launch, a slick tie-in to the upcoming 100th birthday of the Orchestra Nov. 16. Several weeks ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration filmed the Orchestra at the Academy of Music playing the opening bars of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," indelibly linked with Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey.

Karl Nielsen's symphonies blow through concert halls, their sounds a reminder that late romantic music is not neatly categorized. When Daniel Hege led the Haddonfield Symphony in Nielsen's Symphony No. 3 on Saturday, he was on a voyage of discovery. Certainly the piece is not overplayed, and it was probably being heard for the first time at the Voorhees Schools Theater. Nielsen's melodic ideas sound like poetry read in a not-quite-familiar language. Phrases, whole sections, move with fresh motion, modulate, shift and, in this work, burst into gaiety.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's first concert after its gala opening always has the air of a grateful return to its real mission. Orchestra and audience meet with high expectations on both sides and with few distractions to jostle those hopes. That was the basis on which the orchestra began its season last night at the Academy of Music. Riccardo Muti was on the podium, and in this beginning program, defined the orchestra's mission as one of pointing out the unifying threads that connect 19th- and 20th-century music.

DETROIT - The Detroit Symphony Orchestra and its striking musicians said Monday that a tentative agreement reached after a weekend of lengthy negotiating sessions could resolve a six-month walkout. The deal, which was reached after a final 10 hours of talks on Sunday, is subject to a ratification vote expected this week, said musicians' spokesman Greg Bowens. If approved, he said, Detroit Federation of Musicians union members with the nationally acclaimed orchestra could be back at work by next weekend.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has been keeping alive the music of composer Vincent Persichetti with greater care since his death than before. James DePreist, in his first concert of the season, conducted the orchestra in Persichetti's Symphony No. 4 last night at the Mann Music Center. It was a good reminder off the composer's range, for this piece is full of bright good spirits and short bursts of melody. The dark, acerbic sounds of some of his other symphonies appear only occasionally in this piece.

In 1973, when the Philadelphia Orchestra made history in China, Inquirer music critic Daniel Webster was there. Now David Patrick Stearns reports on the 2013 visit, building on this long relationship. MACAU - Where else does your hotel serve cupcakes and ice cream for breakfast? And offer wake-up calls from Shrek? In Cantonese? This pleasure capital of Asia - one that is said to outstrip Las Vegas for superficial splendor - is only the latest unlikely host of the Philadelphia Orchestra on its 40th anniversary tour of China, but in two concerts that were sold out before Friday's video of the musicians playing Dvorak on their rain-delayed flight went viral (with 102,000 You Tube hits in 24 hours)

BEIJING - The Philadelphia Orchestra was divided but not conquered. The orchestra's 40th anniversary tour of China was moving on to Macau on Friday - its last and glitziest tour stop - when a handful of musicians and orchestra executives on the early-bird flight from Beijing were stuck on the tarmac due to heavy rain. The takeoff was delayed six hours. Nonetheless -. "Our musicians would like to offer you a musical surprise," announced orchestra president Allison Vulgamore to the marooned, disgruntled passengers.

In 1973, when the Philadelphia Orchestra made history in China, Inquirer music critic Daniel Webster was there. Now David Patrick Stearns reports on the 2013 visit, building on this long relationship. BEIJING - The two concertmasters bowed together Thursday, the Philadelphia Orchestra's David Kim ceding the first-desk seat to the China National Symphony's Yunzhi Liu. Though the collaboration at the National Center for the Performing Arts (known as the Egg, a reference to its glass and titanium dome)

In 1973, when the Philadelphia Orchestra made history in China, Inquirer music critic Daniel Webster was there. Now David Patrick Stearns reports on the 2013 visit, building on this long relationship. SHANGHAI - Not all of this city's young music lovers were physically able to get to the weekend's Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. Some couldn't even get out of bed. Others were tethered to oxygen tubes and IV drips. So Philadelphia Orchestra violinist Phil Kates went to them, at the Shanghai Children's Medical Center, where children from all over this vast country are sent for treatment of cancer, mostly leukemia.

In 1973, when the Philadelphia Orchestra made history in China, Inquirer music critic Daniel Webster was there. Now David Patrick Stearns reports on the 2013 visit, building on this long relationship. SHANGHAI, China - Saturday was National Children's Day in China, and the Philadelphia Orchestra ended the first week of its 40th anniversary tour and residency on a kid-centric note. In the afternoon, two orchestra members faced perhaps one of the least predictable audiences of their careers at the "Angel Salon," the nickname of a weekly music class at which Beethoven is taught to autistic children.

JUST BECAUSE she'll be in front of a 25-piece orchestra, don't expect songstress Serena Sol Brown to strut onstage in a beaded gown with arms flung back à la Diana Ross. She's far too modest for that. But anything could happen when the Germantown native takes the stage on June 19 as the Sol Unlimited Jazz & Arts summer music series begins on the grounds of the historic Cliveden estate in Germantown. "It's very impromptu for me," the headlining performer explained. "I may start singing something else.

In 1973, when the Philadelphia Orchestra made history in China, Inquirer music critic Daniel Webster was there. Now David Patrick Stearns reports on the current 2013 visit, building on this long relationship. HANGZHOU, China - Maybe they just needed a tune - a big, boisterous one - to show them what the Philadelphia Orchestra is. In the first concert of the 40th Anniversary Tour of China on Friday, the orchestra showed no signs of jet lag during the robust Richard Strauss tone poem Don Juan . But not until the program moved on to Tchaikovsky's less-compact, more broadly etched Capriccio Italien did the sold-out house at the 1,500-seat Hangzhou Grand Theatre respond with something more than muted enthusiasm.

SHANGHAI - After 14 hours in the tiny seats of a trans-global flight, the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians might question the reasons for performing so far from home, so regularly, in what is becoming an annual springtime visit to China. It's tough. The 6-foot-4 cellist Richard Harlow seemed to spend as much time stretching his legs in the aisle as he did sitting. Another cellist, Robert Cafaro, could only tune out the packed-to-the-gills flight by sleeping in his sunglasses as the plane traveled past Greenland, over the northern ice cap and south, high above Russian cities most people hadn't heard of. But once on the ground in Shanghai, cameras flashed, TV crews came in for close-ups, and large bouquets of roses greeted the nine musicians who were part of the original 1973 debut, when the Philadelphia Orchestra was the first American ensemble to play in the People's Republic of China since the Maoist revolution.

The Philadelphia Orchestra always expected to expand its pool of unlikely bedfellows in what is becoming its annual spring visit to China. But could anybody have predicted its new relationship with Shanghai's most popular stand-up comedian? Next to such venerable sponsor names as Cigna and Drexel University for its 2013 Residency and 40th Anniversary Tour of China, which begins Tuesday, sits the logo of the Shanghai Charity Foundation showing a man in a hipster hat and bow tie - Zhou Libo, a dapper, surprisingly outspoken comic who has rock-star status in China.

For the first time in more than 13 years, WRTI-FM (90.1) will broadcast the Philadelphia Orchestra live in concert on Friday afternoon. Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Philadelphians in works by Schumann, Janacek, and Dvorak, and violinist Gil Shaham performs Brahms' Violin Concerto . The 2 p.m. concert in Verizon Hall is dedicated to Wolfgang Sawallisch, who died in February, and opens with the Adagio espressivo from the Symphony No. 2...