Philadelphia Orchestra

Like several previous Philadelphia Orchestra conductors, Charles Dutoit appears to be leaving a bit wounded. After visiting for more than 30 years — as guest conductor, director of the orchestra's two summer seasons, and finally as chief conductor of the regular subscription concerts — Dutoit, who is 75, this week concludes a four-year appointment that encompassed the most troubled period of the institution's history. He'll no doubt return as a guest, though not for awhile, as he maintains a respectful distance while Yannick Nézet-Séguin launches his own music-director tenure in the fall.

Tyrone Breuninger, a trombonist with the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1967 to 1999, sure kept in touch with his roots. In the 1940s, his father's father decided that he didn't want to perform anymore after decades with the Red Hill Band, named for the northern Montgomery County borough where he lived. So he handed his horn to the 7-year-old Tyrone. By the time he was 12, the youngster was a soloist with the band. Fast-forward to 1995 and, in an interview, the Philadelphia Orchestra stalwart said he was still playing occasional small-town summer concerts with his grandfather's old small-town band.

To thousands of aspiring young musicians, what Joseph Conyers achieved in the spring was the stuff of elusive dreams. His resume was plucked from a stack of 237. In auditions, his playing stood out among five dozen others. The pool was culled to 13 musicians, then five. Then two. In the end, after four rounds of orchestral and concerto excerpts, Conyers and his double bass - a well-kept 208-year-old auburn Italian nicknamed "Norma" - won a plum spot in the Philadelphia Orchestra; he played for the first time as a member at its Sept.

William Smith, 68, associate conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the man who introduced two generations of youngsters to orchestral music, died yesterday at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. Mr. Smith, a Havertown resident, had suffered strokes in 1989, 1990 and in October. He last led the orchestra on Dec. 13 and 14, in performances of Handel's Messiah at the Academy of Music. He was hospitalized in January and submitted his resignation to music director Wolfgang Sawallisch in February.

In a way, it's a shame that opera has been consigned to the opera house for so much of its four centuries. The two sides of the form, visual and musical, were of course conceived as a synergistic whole beneath the proscenium. But almost as rebuttal to the Metropolitan Opera's $16 million Ring cycle and its 45-ton set, the Philadelphia Orchestra put on an Elektra on Thursday night in Verizon Hall that, by omitting costumes and sets, burned a deep hole in the theory that the eye has any legitimate claim on the genre.

The Mann Center takes the populist road again this summer, matching orchestras with projected images, a video-game heroine, and fireworks. Philadelphia's own resident orchestral ensemble, for which the Mann Center for the Performing Arts was built, works another reduced load, with just six concerts (down from 18, 12, or the more recent norm of nine). The Mann has tried to get more, but the orchestra says its busy summer in China, Colorado, and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., has made scheduling at the Mann difficult.

When the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 last spring, its leaders said the reorganization would cost $2.9 million in legal and administrative fees, and they predicted the orchestra would be out of bankruptcy in the latter part of 2011. The legal tab now looks likely to be triple that initial estimate, and the case is entering its second year. On April 16, 2011, the ensemble's 75-member board voted - with a few abstentions, and all five musicians on the board voting "no" - to become the first major U.S. orchestra to file for bankruptcy.

In a bold return to previous eras of youthful leadership, the Philadelphia Orchestra has chosen to be led by an emerging - though much sought-after - conductor. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a 35-year-old Canadian whose starry orchestra and opera career is much in the ascent of late, is set to become Philadelphia's eighth music director in 2012. At that time, chief conductor Charles Dutoit will take the title of conductor laureate. The orchestra's board was expected to approve the appointment Monday.

Yefim Bronfman was the soloist in Prokofiev's brashly entertaining Third Piano Concerto, whose energies enlivened the Philadelphia Orchestra program, under Charles Dutoit, last night at the Academy of Music. Bronfman, 34, and a frequent visitor to this orchestra, possesses that brilliance of tone and overall alacrity to make the most of its glittering timbres and escalations, while his command of the work's sonorities is impressively virile. There was much to admire in the keyboard's climbing, spiraling passagework - its perpetual fevers that can exhaust a player's busy wrist.

Tyrone Breuninger, a trombonist with the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1967 to 1999, sure kept in touch with his roots. In the 1940s, his father's father decided that he didn't want to perform anymore after decades with the Red Hill Band, named for the northern Montgomery County borough where he lived. So he handed his horn to the 7-year-old Tyrone. By the time he was 12, the youngster was a soloist with the band. Fast-forward to 1995 and, in an interview, the Philadelphia Orchestra stalwart said he was still playing occasional small-town summer concerts with his grandfather's old small-town band.

PRINCETON — Conductor Rossen Milanov has been making the Philadelphia version of the Grand Tour: Last week was Symphony in C in Camden, Friday was the Curtis (his alma mater) Symphony Orchestra at the Mann Center, and Sunday — most notably — was his end-of-season Princeton Symphony Orchestra concert at Richardson Auditorium here. In a program featuring Brahms' Symphony No. 4 and a new work by Princeton composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, Milanov stepped out from behind his image as dependable, congenial Rossen to become a conductor who wields demonic power.

Like several previous Philadelphia Orchestra conductors, Charles Dutoit appears to be leaving a bit wounded. After visiting for more than 30 years — as guest conductor, director of the orchestra's two summer seasons, and finally as chief conductor of the regular subscription concerts — Dutoit, who is 75, this week concludes a four-year appointment that encompassed the most troubled period of the institution's history. He'll no doubt return as a guest, though not for awhile, as he maintains a respectful distance while Yannick Nézet-Séguin launches his own music-director tenure in the fall.

In a way, it's a shame that opera has been consigned to the opera house for so much of its four centuries. The two sides of the form, visual and musical, were of course conceived as a synergistic whole beneath the proscenium. But almost as rebuttal to the Metropolitan Opera's $16 million Ring cycle and its 45-ton set, the Philadelphia Orchestra put on an Elektra on Thursday night in Verizon Hall that, by omitting costumes and sets, burned a deep hole in the theory that the eye has any legitimate claim on the genre.

Sir Simon Rattle, the conductor who got away, returned Thursday for one of his periodic guest dates, and his relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which courted him breathlessly for its music directorship prior to his 1999 Berlin Philharmonic appointment, was all it has ever been (which is a lot). No particularly sexy programming this time, just Germanic masterpieces with the orchestra playing at something close to its peak and Rattle with his characteristic combination of strategy, intellectualism, and heat.

Forget the usual overseas concert tours, when the Philadelphia Orchestra arrives like some grand ocean liner with all routes planned years in advance. The orchestra's May 28-June 6 residency and tour of China, details of which were to be announced Wednesday in Beijing and Philadelphia, was hatched in a matter of months — five full orchestral concerts in four cities, master classes, chamber concerts, many other ancillary events, plus plans stretching five years into the future. "Announcing in the fall and going in May — that's quick time," said orchestra president Allison Vulgamore.

Resolving the most quarrelsome aspect of its bankruptcy, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association has settled with the national musicians' pension fund that had threatened expensive and time-consuming litigation over the orchestra's withdrawal from the fund. The American Federation of Musicians and Employers' Pension Fund (AFM-EPF), which had filed a $35 million claim in the case, will drop all its legal challenges in exchange for $1.75 million from the orchestra. The development allows the orchestra to approach bankruptcy Judge Eric L. Frank with an uncontested reorganization plan, which means - if the orchestra can wrap up talks with the Kimmel Center over a new lease - that it could be out of bankruptcy within 90 days.

Can't play without the best It's already apparent that the Phillies without Chase Utley and Ryan Howard are comparable to my wonderful Philadelphia Orchestra attempting to play the masterful "Ninth Symphony" without the services of concertmaster David Kim and the first violin section. It's just not going to happen, either at Citizens Bank Park or Verizon Hall. Jules Slatko, Holland Save the United States Joe Henwood aptly describes the concept, design, and construction of the SS United States as exemplifying the "can do" attitude of our country in his call to action to save that iconic symbol of the American spirit from being reduced to a scrap heap, quite likely in a foreign scrap yard ("Time to rescue another great ship," April 15)

Mild-mannered he is not. If Jaap van Zweden were a dinner-party guest, he might dominate table chatter, slide headlong into controversy, and hold forth in a self-important if good-humored tone. As it was, leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in Friday night's all-Russian program, the 51-year-old Dutchman was one of those guests trailing disagreement in his wake while still managing to leave you feeling more stimulated than riled. His most questionable piece of judgment on the podium in Verizon Hall was the sprint through the last movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4. The pace was simply ridiculous.

By turning toward conducting, Joshua Bell appears to have become a born-again violinist. His arrival as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields on Monday at the Kimmel Center might have suggested that he's moving away from the repertoire and art on which he made his name — as so many have before him. Paradoxically, however, the opposite has happened. Though Bell has long been one of the most consistent of A-list violinists, recent Philadelphia Orchestra concerto appearances suggested that he had grown a bit comfortable, his playing lacking immediacy aside from his self-authored cadenzas.