Orchestra

Stack nine players at one piano keyboard and you have, besides a lot of elbows, the chance to hear all 88 notes played at once. Of course, two players use only nine fingers - but which two? You also have one of the challenges pianist-conductor John Kozar relishes as he goes about his business of celebrating, in the grandest way, the instrument that used to be in every home but is fighting a Darwinian battle for survival in an age of electronics and virtual realities. Kozar conducts orchestras of pianos.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is making medical as well as musical news on its European tour. Sunday night, violist Anna Marie Ahn Petersen suffered an attack of appendicitis. Edward Viner, the physician traveling with the orchestra, took her to a hospital for tests early Monday. She underwent surgery a few hours later. Viner reported she was doing well, and said she would probably fly to Philadelphia on the weekend. Viner continues to monitor the progress of Neil Courtney, the bass player who suffered a heart attack May 12 in Warsaw.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has received a $50 million gift from the Annenberg Foundation, a major boost for its five-year, $125 million endowment drive. The campaign, titled "A Sound, a City, a Civilization," has already received pledges of $26 million. The Orchestra has historically trailed most other major orchestras in endowments by more than 50 percent. Its current endowment is about $75 million, compared with an average of $150 million for other major orchestras. Nonprofit cultural organizations use endowment funds to expand their programs beyond the routine cost of staffing and putting on a season.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has announced details of two more free neighborhood concerts, completing its summer roster of three area programs. On July 1, it will perform at Penn's Landing's Festival Pier at Columbus Boulevard and Spring Garden Street, thought to be a better-suited orchestra site than last year's Great Plaza location. July 11 brings the orchestra to Montgomery County Community College at 340 DeKalb Pike in Blue Bell, making up for a program last summer that was rained out. A previously announced July 5 concert will be held across the Delaware at Camden's Whitman Park, at Davis and Copewood streets.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has won Round 1 of what is expected to be a lengthy fight over whether the city will condemn property that the orchestra needs for its proposed $83 million concert hall at Broad and Spruce streets. The city Planning Commission voted yesterday to make property needed to build the hall eligible for condemnation, despite the strong objections of businessmen who own the land. The commission had deadlocked on the issue at its April 21 meeting. At that time, the commission had requested more information from the orchestra regarding its plans for the site, which is within an area bounded by Broad, Spruce, Delancey and 15th streets.

The greater the composer, the more serious is the skepticism greeting an undiscovered work. The classical music world has been burned of late by the resurrection of Beethoven orchestral works that the composer rightly left unfinished - though scholars who cobble them together from sketches argue otherwise. One of the few exceptions is Charles Ives' similarly reclaimed Emerson Concerto, heard here Friday in the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's American Roots Festival. First played in 1998, the concerto not only sounds real, but important.

The Philadelphia Orchestra heads to California and Japan tomorrow on a tour that has the air of a comfortable family visit. It will be the orchestra's sixth time in Japan since 1967, a span that has allowed veteran players to see much of the musical revolution that has swept that country. By returning regularly, the orchestra has turned audiences into connoisseurs and Japanese instrumentalists into familiar companions. For orchestra members - themselves now connoisseurs of Japanese restaurants, country inns, theaters, baseball fields and hiking paths - the tour also has a competitive edge.

Five months after a strike that challenged its artistic mission, the Haddonfield Symphony will open its new season tomorrow with many new players in its ranks and guest conductor Michael Charry on the podium. The 8 p.m. concert will be at Voorhees School Theater. The orchestra, formerly a community ensemble for non-professional musicians, is changing into an intern orchestra in which top students and beginning professionals can move toward careers. The strike, which protested the orchestra's move toward fully professional status, saw 40 volunteer players, some of whom had been among the founders of the 39-year-old ensemble, expelled from the orchestra.

The Philadelphia Orchestra flies westward to the East tomorrow, beginning both a three-week tour and a new musical relationship. The orchestra will play in Japan, move on to China for two concerts and end its circle in Hong Kong. Orchestral tours are all alike, yet each is dramatically different. The purpose is to perform for new audiences, to remind the world that Philadelphia's greatest export is its symphonic music, and to reinvigorate the sale of recordings. It's a business trip by people who dress formally when making their sales pitch.

The National Arts Centre Orchestra, which played its local debut last night at the Academy of Music, must be one of the most genial orchestras on the continent. Almost unique in its size - 46 players - the orchestra of Canada's capital city, Ottawa, played its debut as an accompanist to flutist James Galway. That ordering of priorities must have been the idea of its tour management, but what must have been seen as a sure sell was, instead, a serious injustice to an excellent orchestra.