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.

The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia doesn't end its season with a bang, but with the sort of alternative mandate in which Mozart's less-often-played Symphony No. 29 is an appropriate grand finale. Other conductors might have questioned that at Monday's concert in the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater: The 18-year-old Mozart was turning out consistently pleasant music at that time, but not mature masterpieces. Still, music director Dirk Brossé told the audience that it rates high among his favorites, so one had to trust that he hears something others miss.

A concert or a sports victory? The Philadelphia Orchestra performance on Friday felt like the latter at the close of the Mahler Symphony No. 1 , with each of the principal players being cheered like Olympic gold-medal winners, the biggest applause being reserved for music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Though Bach's St. Matthew Passion was his greatest artistic feat so far this season, this Mahler concert was perhaps Nézet-Séguin's biggest audience success - in a symphony that can more or less play itself, but is hardly fail-safe.

A concert or a sports victory? The Philadelphia Orchestra performance on Friday felt like the latter at the close of the Mahler Symphony No. 1 , with each of the principal players being cheered, spontaneously and vociferously, like Olympic gold medal winners, the biggest applause being reserved for music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Though Bach's St. Matthew Passion was his greatest artistic feat so far this season, this Mahler concert was perhaps his biggest audience success - in a symphony that can more or less play itself, but is hardly fail safe.

It was a rare sight. Not long ago, a woman stood at the entrance to the Kimmel Center before a sold-out Philadelphia Orchestra concert, holding a sign: "Need one ticket. " A few weeks earlier, a couple called the box office the day after a performance of The Rite of Spring and made a $10,000 gift. Points of contact like these represent the kind of passion the orchestra must stoke if it is to survive, yet they remain all too infrequent. More than nine months out of bankruptcy, it's still a struggle to get past living hand-to-mouth.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's J.S. Bach immersion continues at Verizon Hall as earnestly as in the recent St. Matthew Passion , and with greater density and outward playfulness. Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-4 plus Orchestral Suite No. 3 are works in which Bach brought the concerto-for-orchestra form to an apex that nobody else caught up with for centuries. And those pieces kept the orchestra busier than Mahler's Symphony No. 8 on Thursday, with numerous key players facing strenuous solo turns.

Cartoons, sports, video games, Jerry Garcia, the Great American Songbook: Orchestra season at the Mann Center continues to track ever more toward pop culture. This summer's orchestra roster of artists and repertoire being imported by the Fairmount Park presenter aims to bring new listeners to classical music by way of just about anything else. "It is a tactical approach to building audiences," said Mann president and CEO Catherine M. Cahill. "We believe if we can get families into the Mann to experience what we have, it will get people to consider coming back and trying something else.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is to announce Thursday that it will return to China May 31 to June 9, marking the 40th anniversary of its groundbreaking 1973 debut there with an agenda that goes well beyond concerts. The orchestra's second China residency will feature master classes, workshops, pop-up performances in public places, hospitals and schools, as well as playing alongside local orchestras in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Macao. Venues to be visited vary from the Picun Migrant Worker's Village Elementary School in Beijing to the Venetian, Macao's huge recreational complex where the orchestra's two concerts under frequent guest Donald Runnicles will compete with 3,400 slot machines.

Nolan Miller, 73, of Haddonfield, whose ultrarefined sound led the legendarily blended French horn section of the Philadelphia Orchestra for several decades, died Sunday, April 7, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He had been battling leukemia and died of a stroke, said his wife, Marjorie. Mr. Miller joined the orchestra as coprincipal horn upon graduation from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1965 and assumed the principal horn spot in the 1978-79 season. He retired from the orchestra after four decades, in 2005.

How could such great music have been absent from the Philadelphia Orchestra for so long? The answer was clear by the end of Thursday's sold-out, three-hour-plus St. Matthew Passion , the first performance of the work by the orchestra in 28 years: For all the effort required to perform J.S. Bach's masterpiece, the sublime may always be in view but never consistently achieved. Example: Though the presentation at Verizon Hall had surtitles, a handsome, minimal staging, first-class singers, and the uncut piece delivered in music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin's reverent tempos, the performance wasn't all it could be until the second half.

Next season's previously announced performance of Salome , Richard Strauss' erotically charged biblical opera based on Oscar Wilde's play, will be a coproduction of Opera Philadelphia and Philadelphia Orchestra, the two groups announced Monday. It is the first in a series of anticipated collaborations between the organizations, though leaders could not say exactly where the sharing of resources might lead. "This one's all about getting something started," said Opera Philadelphia general director David B. Devan.