Pianist

Vladimir "Billy" Sokoloff, pianist and senior member of the Curtis Institute faculty, died yesterday morning after a long illness. He was 84. Dr. Sokoloff was known for his artistry as a chamber music player. At the Curtis, he taught many hundreds the finer points of musical partnership. Beginning in his student days, he had partnered with the greats - violinist Efrem Zimbalist, soprano Marcella Sembrich, violist William Primrose and cellist Emanuel Feuermann He counted Philadelphia Orchestra principals as colleagues and chamber partners, including flutist William Kincaid and oboist Marcel Tabuteau.

Don't look for Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes at tonight's Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Due to illness, he canceled his Thursday-through-Saturday concerts, where he was to perform Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 2. Efforts were made to replace him with the 20-year-old Chinese pianist Yundi Li, who couldn't be released from concert commitments in Paris. However, the Philadelphia Orchestra is close to confirming what will be Li's U.S. orchestral debut, for July 2003 at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

When it comes to Peter Cincotti, the wunderkind who played Penn's Annenberg Hall with his quartet Saturday night, the biggest question is this: Can we believe the hype? The answer: Yes and no. The easy answer would be to say that Cincotti is everything we've been led to believe by the latter-day Tin Pan Alley publicity machine. Yes, he is, as a musician, mature beyond his years. He is a maddeningly exacting pianist, a true pro and craftsman who has mastered the styles of those who preceded him. As a vocalist, he is far less seasoned.

Soprano Benita Valente and pianist Cynthia Raim have been performing Spanish programs on tour, and they extracted four unusual samples from their repertoire for a recital Sunday at the Convention Center. The songs were from Cancionero de Pedrell by Roberto Gerhard, the Swiss- born composer who studied in Barcelona and pulled on Catalonian identity like a sweater. Three of the songs were in Catalan; one was in Spanish, and all featured the composer's approach of enlarging rhythms as the songs develop.

A lot of hype surrounded pianist Sandrine Erdely-Sayo's American premiere of Juan-Carlos Sedero's Lyrical Suite on Sunday at the Ethical Society. Most of it was unjustified. The French-born Erdely-Sayo, who in 1990 came to Philadelphia to study at the University of the Arts, was one of several pianists who received the Argentine composer's seven-section score. The taped performance she sent back to the composer so impressed him that he chose her to give the world premiere last summer in France.

In classical music, where a strong-willed personality is an asset, students don't always resemble their teachers in any discernible way. But in the case of Cecile Licad, the apple didn't fall very far from the tree. Licad's recital Sunday clearly revealed the influence of one of her three teachers at the Curtis Institute of Music, Rudolf Serkin. (Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Seymour Lipkin were the other two). Serkin's presence was especially apparent in Mozart's Fantasia (K. 475)

Traditions thrive in Philadelphia, traditions such as the Academy Morning Musicales, a series created in 1905 by the enterprising members of the West Philadelphia Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Orchestra. At 93, it's still flourishing. Yesterday, a piano recital by Rieko Aizawa brought the 1997-98 series to a close. A capacity crowd demonstrated palpable enthusiasm. The pianist, a Curtis grad, is 23. She recently made her New York debut and soon heads for the St. Louis Symphony for a concerto.

Orchestral color was everything in the early years of this century, and the French - or French-inspired - came from the subtlest palettes. That was the message of the Philadelphia Orchestra's concert Wednesday at the Mann Music Center. Artistic director Charles Dutoit has made this final week of the season an essay on French orchestral invention and influence, and in his concert Wednesday shaped what was one of the most interesting programs of the season. With Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha as soloist, Dutoit made half a concert from Turina's Rhapsodia sinfonica and Falla's Noches en los jardines de Espana, and completed the essay by playing all of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe ballet.

The extraordinary Roman pianist Fermo Roscigno drew repeated bravos from a capacity crowd at the Ethical Society last night. Roscigno, in his first Philadelphia appearance, was sponsored by the Consulate General of Italy and the America-Italy Society of Philadelphia. A dull-looking, all-19th-century program came to vivid life at his hands, starting with an unpromising Clementi sonata. Listeners sat up right away: Clementi, it seemed, was a better composer than we thought. As his Op. 26, No. 2 proceeded, it became clear that Roscino's strong dynamic contrasts and boldly outlined phrases had much to do with Clementi's unwonted shine.

The second week of the ongoing Swarthmore Music and Dance Festival concluded yesterday with an afternoon recital by Cynthia Raim. The beauty of the autumn foliage, which one could view from the spectacular rear-stage window of Lang Concert Hall, likely discouraged attendance indoors. Only 200 of Lang's 600 seats appeared filled, but Raim was fortunate that her audience (which, sensitively, grouped itself in one seating area) was discriminating and attentive. This was as it should be, since Raim is a discriminating pianist, polished on every level of her art. Within an arsenal of poise and power lie strong ideas and intelligent perceptions.

If a night at the orchestra were a pure investment-return transaction, Lang Lang certainly gave Thursday's audience its money's worth. It's when the actual music entered the equation that things got a little dicey. You had to look past a lot to hear it. At the front of Verizon Hall stage, with Simon Rattle leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist air-conducted or air-trilled with an idle hand when Beethoven failed to give him enough to do, mugged all manner of facial expressions, and kept leaning out to look at the audience, as if to ask: Do you like this?

Iconic crooners don't get any more comfy than Dean Martin, who ambled through his performing life with supreme ease and deceptive artistry, most apparent when he wasn't making fun of himself. Supposedly, he was so cool that his heart beat only five times a minute. But that's not what you see with Dino! An Evening With Dean Martin at the Latin Casino , now playing to full-ish houses at the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio. The show's conceit is that Martin arrives at Cherry Hill's Latin Casino in 1978 amid a snowstorm and without his band.

Often lost amid all the exactitude issuing from conservatories today is the reason we make music in the first place. It's not about being able to play all the notes or play them in tune. Interpretation has to mean something if it is to be worth the trouble, especially since the trouble is considerable. How fortunate, then, must be the students of Miriam Fried, the violin pedagogue who teaches at the New England Conservatory. On Sunday night, for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, she came to the Perelman Theater with one of her progeny - in fact, her prime progeny, pianist Jonathan Biss, who happens to be her son. Whatever their offstage dynamics may be, in terms of musical substance it was a performance of equals - if very different ones.

Van Cliburn, 78, the intrepid pianist whose 1958 win at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow was seized upon as a stroke of American triumphalism at the height of the Cold War, died Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth, Texas. He died of bone cancer, his publicist said. Striking Soviet gold transformed Mr. Cliburn from pianist into pop-culture phenomenon. Inevitably described as a "lanky Texan," whose 6 feet, 4 inches were topped by a wavy, flaxen pompadour, he was welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade down lower Broadway that was compared to the one in 1927 for Charles A. Lindbergh.

Piano man "Bobby Chic" was part of the finger-snapping soundtrack for the Age of Cool. Born Robert M. Cicalese in South Philadelphia, he romanced the ivories from the Jersey Shore to Las Vegas and back again over a career that lasted until a couple of years before his death Wednesday, Jan. 30, at age 76. In the 1960s, he was one of the cats setting the casino surge to music along the Strip. But his favored haunt was Atlantic City, where he played Paul "Skinny" D'Amato's 500 Club, a heady mixed drink of mobsters, showgirls, Rat Packers, and backroom gamblers.

With his cunning wisps of dance tunes and church harmonies, Schubert gives even the mildly astute performer an easy way into his music. But Imogen Cooper doesn't have the kind of mind that lends itself to the easy way in, or out. The London pianist, in Wednesday night's all-Schubert recital at the Perelman Theater, introduced an air of struggle and vulnerability that went far beyond the usual highlighting of abrupt mood swings, major-minor ambiguity, and...

The supremacy of the violin and piano repertoire is such that we're taught not to expect much good solo stuff for instruments such as clarinet. Yet a musician of Ricardo Morales' caliber can't just live on the works written when Mozart, Brahms, and Debussy paid momentary attention to the instrument. So almost all of the music played by the Philadelphia Orchestra principal clarinetist and pianist Natalie Zhu Monday at the American Philosophical Society was new to seasoned ears - even to Jennifer Higdon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who heard her 201 2 Clarinet Sonata for the first time.

If you combed through the piano recital programs of the coming year and put the most forbidding pieces into one concert, you'd have Ieva Jokubaviciute's recital Thursday at Settlement Music School. In the program, titled " New Century, New Paths" and presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, this fully matured Lithuanian pianist skillfully guided one's ears through Debussy, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Janacek, and Berg in performances that confidently created a trajectory from which all the composers benefited.

Carnegie Hall advertisements are likely to prompt deja-vu echoes among Philadelphia concertgoers: Didn't we just hear that concert here? For a lot less money? Same thing when Nonesuch releases pianist Jeremy Denk's recording of the Goldberg Variations in the coming months. Wasn't he recently playing them here? Though Philadelphia is a significant destination for classical performers, there's no getting around its proximity to New York City - or how much the two cities feed off each other culturally.

Jimmy McCracklin, 91, who by his count composed nearly a thousand songs and recorded hundreds, including the 1950s hit "The Walk," died Thursday in San Pablo, Calif. Mr. McCracklin's music spanned decades and eras of rhythm and blues, from up-tempo jump blues of the 1940s to soul of the 1960s and '70s. Mr. McCracklin released more than 20 albums, but he never recorded his most lucrative song, "Tramp. " The song cracked the pop charts in 1967 when it was recorded by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas.