Richard Strauss

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra would seem the almost ideal performer of the music of Richard Strauss. Brilliant and brash, the orchestra has played this kind of music with a swagger. At least, that was its pulse and style under Sir Georg Solti, who took the laureate title when Daniel Barenboim became music director two years ago. From 2 to 4 p.m. tomorrow on Channel 12, in concerts devoted to Strauss tone poems, the CSO shows that there are no absolutes in music, and that reputations are renewed with every performance.

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.

Giuseppe Sinopoli, one of the most idiosyncratic of today's conductors, brings London's Philharmonia Orchestra to the Academy of Music tomorrow afternoon. Known for his sometimes unorthodox but always passionate approach, Sinopoli has been heard more on compact discs than in person. For this concert, he's chosen two familiar works in the Austro-German tradition that can take plenty of interpretive leeway, Richard Strauss' achingly surging "Death and Transfiguration" and Mahler's powerful First Symphony.

Many people have an image of Wolfgang Sawallisch as a conservative conductor - solid, safe and staid. And it is true that some of his performances are not exactly electric. But that can't be said when the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director is leading music of Richard Strauss, as he was last night at the Academy of Music. Through concerts and recordings, Sawallisch and the Philadelphians are quickly becoming known as one of the great Strauss partnerships. In Don Juan, Op. 20, Strauss' famously extroverted tone poem, Sawallisch urgently moved from one section to the next.

Richard Strauss' tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra is made for the young and the restless. There was little doubt that the Curtis Symphony Orchestra would take to the work's thunder with zest Sunday night at the Academy of Music. I was curious as to how these inordinately gifted young people - whose ensemble is an Olympic training camp for major orchestras - would sound under guest conductor and alumnus Robert Spano. Spano, who received his own degree at Curtis 14 years ago, is one of the top U.S. citizens of his age group on a podium.

Richard Strauss wrote some rich autumnal roles for soprano, rewards for long and thoughtful lives onstage. The role of the Countess in Capriccio holds a special place in that collection, and in Kiri Te Kanawa, the Metropolitan Opera has found a special singer for the part. The Met opened its first-ever production of Strauss' last opera on Friday, stirring a little controversy with its staging but confirming with the care of its musical preparation the opera's intelligence and surpassing beauty.

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 Academy of Music resounded with the healthy buzz of young voices last evening - a gratifying departure from the Philadelphia Orchestra's usually appreciative but rather staid over-40 audience. The occasion was the first Senior Student Concert of the orchestra's season - which area high school students traditionally attend in encouraging numbers. Conductor William Smith led a program of Bach, Richard Strauss and Beethoven, to which he added helpful commentary. As first-prize winner in the senior category of student auditions annually held here, 23-year-old oboist Alex Klein warranted the stage.

Great film music, no matter how beautiful or compelling on its own, is created to enhance the primary power of the screen image. So documentary director Joshua Waletsky was faced with a dilemma: how to emphasize the music by the great film-score masters of the 1930s and '40s without having the visual images inevitably dominate. His solution, seen in tonight's screening on Channel 12, was to have John Mauceri conduct the music live, synchronized to familiar clips of "Gone with the Wind," "Casablanca," "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Laura" and many others.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's chamber music series took star billing yesterday when Wolfgang Sawallisch stepped from the podium to the keyboard for a program at the Academy of Music ballroom. Sawallisch, the music director-designate, was making his second chamber- music appearance within his two week span of concerts with the orchestra. He was repeating a performance of Schubert's "Trout" Quintet, which he and members of the De Pasquale Quartet had tried out Jan. 27 at Villanova.

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.

Music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin substituted for guest conductor Jaap van Zweden Thursday, thereby reviving a tradition from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Ormandy era. On short notice, Nézet-Séguin stepped into a subtly crafted program based on a historical query, but altered it to shape an orchestral showcase with emphasis on a whooping good time. Van Zweden had lined up Brahms, Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss to ask the question raging at the time of the Philadelphia Orchestra's birth in 1900: "Where is music heading?"

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.

RENEE FLEMING, 8 p.m. tomorrow, Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Broad and Spruce streets, $28-$81, 215-893-1999. SPENDING TIME with Renee Fleming is like talking to an old friend, for her candor and complete lack of guile are true delights. In her Manhattan office, she responded generously to a long list of questions. Q: Haven't you developed a great kinship for our orchestra's new music director, Christoph Eschenbach? A: Yes, I feel the closest relationship with him of any conductor.

Divadom can be so fragile. Soprano Dame Felicity Lott has enjoyed 25 years before the public, portraying many countesses in Mozart and Strauss operas under ceaselessly prestigious circumstances - plus recitals all over Europe, America, and her native England. With Lott's intelligence, stage charisma and a vocal timbre that is hers alone, she's the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf of our time - a true vocal aristocrat - though with a delightfully peculiar specialty: Offenbach operettas and risque cabaret songs, some of which will be heard in her Thursday recital at the Kimmel Center.

Is it a symphony orchestra concert if . . . 1. The strings aren't there? 2. The conductor is sitting? 3. The music isn't great? The answer depends on the conviction behind the performances - unless it involves Philadelphia Orchestra music director Wolfgang Sawallisch, who goes beyond conviction, projecting a sense of inevitability that tells you this is the way it should be, now and always. Yet even he pressed his luck Thursday with a program whose first half was occupied by one of Richard Strauss' most obscure works: Sonatina No. 2 for wind instruments, sometimes called Symphony for Wind Instruments and always subtitled (less than charismatically)

The classical music world is giving more welcome to women who answer to the title "Maestra. " Yet the svelte, stylish assistant conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia is allergic to this feminine version of the respectful salutation "Maestro. " Her reluctance to assume that mantle says a lot about her and the decades of accumulated wisdom that come with a musical specialty that claims few women, few African Americans, and almost none who are both. In other words, "Maestra" is a title Jeri Lynne Johnson wants to earn.

Unintentional, perhaps, was the way in which Orchestra 2001 paid tribute to Aaron Copland Wednesday night. They set out to honor the 100th anniversary of the American icon's birth - coming Nov. 14 - with a sturdy performance of the 13-instrument version of Appalachian Spring. But even before they could get to it, Richard Danielpour's First Light for chamber orchestra announced its debt to Copland through conciliatory, even loving, gestures. Danielpour, who teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music and is riding a wave of popularity at the moment, also knit into the 1988 work considerable violence heightened by the snug acoustics of the Trinity Center for Urban Life - percussion violence, mostly, that was jarring.

Because you're fabulous in Philadelphia doesn't mean you can just arrive in a major music capital like London without announcing yourself. To that end, Wolfgang Sawallisch's first stop in the Philadelphia Orchestra's "Centennial Tour" of Europe wasn't in Birmingham's acclaimed new Symphony Hall, where the orchestra opens its tour tonight, or London's Royal Festival Hall, where it continues on Friday. No, Sawallisch emerged yesterday from his suite at the Savoy Hotel to visit the British Broadcasting Company.

In observing the 50th anniversary of the death of Richard Strauss, Philadelphia Orchestra musicians have played all around him, developing a context in which his sources and influences could be measured and felt. In the chamber concert Sunday in the Academy of Music ballroom, Wolfgang Sawallisch and Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky performed Mahler songs, and orchestra members played Bartok's neo-Straussian Piano Quintet and an arrangement of Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel. Hearing Sawallisch play Mahler is an event.