Soloist

It's startling to realize how much a single orchestral player can lift up everything going on around him or her, and no arrival has been better for the ensemble health of the Philadelphia Orchestra than that, in 2003, of Ricardo Morales. The principal clarinetist, in fact, may represent the most salutary personnel event of the orchestra's last decade. An ensemble player, however, does not a soloist make. The skills of the two jobs are not merely distinct, they're at opposite ends of the individuality spectrum.

Marigrace Bucher Komarnicki, 75, a soloist at Narberth Presbyterian Church for 40 years, died of cancer Feb. 27 at her Radnor home. Mrs. Komarnicki grew up in Mount Joy, Lancaster County. She graduated from high school there in 1951 and from Elizabethtown College in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in education. Mrs. Komarnicki taught kindergarten through second grade in the Manheim school system from 1955 to 1958 before moving to California and teaching the same grades in Upland and Long Beach, her daughter Kristyn Blancon said.

The first night of the 18-concert Mann Music Center season with the Philadelphia Orchestra always has a special feeling, as though the whole summer is about to float on familiar music. Crowds of earlybirds, with free tickets received through coupons printed in the Daily News, pour in early to stake out seats on the grass and benches under the stars - and perhaps to enjoy a pre-concert picnic. (If you forgot to mail in a free-ticket coupon, there's still hope - just convince the folks at the Visitors Center, 16th Street and JFK Boulevard, that you've just arrived from Moose Jaw, Wyo., just to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The Academy of Music blazed with good playing yesterday afternoon when violinist Christian Tetzlaff gave his first performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tetzlaff, who is 30 and from Hamburg, Germany, played the Arnold Schoenberg Violin Concerto, Op. 36, which rather astonishingly has not been heard in this hall since its world premiere here in 1940. Louis Krasner was the soloist then, Leopold Stokowski the conductor. This time around, Christoph Eschenbach, music director of the Houston Symphony, led the proceedings, which were commendable for the orchestra's enthusiastic precision and alacrity.

Andr? Watts stands as a grand contradiction to anyone who utters the tiresome complaint that today's pianists don't have the charisma of . . . (you fill in the names). Along with Argerich, Uchida, Brendel and Schiff, Watts is as strong a personality as the keyboard has ever known. What, you say his repertoire isn't broad and serious enough to be considered in that kind of company? The piano has all kinds of specialists. Let's just accept Watts, 57, as the standard-repertoire showman that he is. He was very easy to accept Thursday night in a Saint-Sa?ns Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The soaring voice of an accomplished operatic soloist was stilled Tuesday with the death of Alice Elizabeth Mullen. She was 34 and lived in King of Prussia. Mullen was internationally acclaimed for her clarity of voice, enthusiastic delivery and ability to inject heartfelt emotion into the simplest musical phrase. In 1994, she was one of 50 performers selected by world-renowned composer Gian Carlo Menotti to represent the United States at the prestigious Spoleto International Music Festival in Spoleto, Italy.

Doralene Davis is best known in the singing world for her recording of Mozart's "Solemn Vespers," but in Philadelphia she is famous for her rousing rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a Flyers' game last year. "I've sung at Carnegie Hall and all over the world, but never have I got the attention like I did singing for a hockey team," Davis said with a laugh. "My kids thought this was a really big deal. "When I had an operation I told my surgeon that he couldn't put a tube down my throat because I was a singer.

The last time violinist Oscar Shumsky was soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, there was a war on. Two, actually - one involving the rest of the world, and the other involving Shumsky and conductor Eugene Ormandy, who quarreled vigorously over musical matters. That private war resulted in a 44- year interim in Shumsky's solo career with the Philadelphians. But the war is over, Riccardo Muti has ascended the Philadelphia podium, and Shumsky, now 70, will play Elgar's Violin Concerto tonight in the first of four performances at the Academy of Music.

Audiences here may feel they have been present at the development of violinist Sarah Chang. After all, the 14-year-old Philadelphian has been playing in public since she was 6, but has anyone really been present at the development of this remarkable artist? Chang will be soloist tonight with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Music Center. She's a veteran on that stage, a friend of orchestra members and an intimate of the orchestra's music director, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and of the summer artistic director, Charles Dutoit.

The presence of soloist Andrew Willis seemed to energize the Mozart Society Orchestra in its season opener Sunday. Until he settled at the fortepiano for the Mozart Concerto in D minor (K. 466), Davis Jerome's orchestra had walked through a Mozart divertimento and Haydn's Symphony No. 47 with scarcely a glance to left or right. In the concerto, the orchestra took a new tone from the beginning, when the strings plunged into the music with strong regard for phrase and for the shading of the writing.