Symphony

Legend has it that a favorite drinking game of the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was to spend the evening prodigiously imbibing with friends, after which one of them would be abruptly shut into a closet for 15 minutes or so. Then, from the other side of the door, the closeted partyer was ordered to give the full names of the people with whom he had spent the evening. Just to see if he was too hammered to do so. Or had passed out. No wonder Sibelius never finished his Symphony No. 8 . But now, perhaps, others can. Sketches - some of them orchestrated - have been identified as probably being from the symphony that occupied him from 1927 until his death in 1957.

Shostakovich's 1943 Symphony No. 8 is one in a handful of works that fathom the trauma of the 20th century with a boldness and originality so fearless that it's not often performed around here. However compelling Symphony in C's performance was on Saturday in Rutgers University-Camden's Gordon Theater, it went far to explain why: Once the steep musical challenges are met, you're entering a World War II-era abyss that not everyone (players or audience) can or will inhabit. Full of gargantuan war-inspired orchestral effects that prompt a visceral response from any alert musician, the symphony also requires a kind of life experience that the conservatory-age Symphony in C musicians can't be expected to have.

Though only nine minutes away from Philadelphia by train, Symphony in C's Rutgers-Camden home is truly in another state, which is why the prospect of hearing Gyorgy Ligeti's Violin Concerto on Saturday at the Gordon Theater felt vaguely perilous. This post-conservatory orchestra and its soloist Augustin Hadelich could be counted on to meet the music's considerable demands. But what about the suburban audience? The outset was not promising: After a new orchestra piece by Roger Zare titled Green Flash (winner of the orchestra's annual Young Composers Competition)

The Bruckner symphonies, taken as a whole, always sound to me like a man asking the same question over and over again his entire life, only slightly reshuffling the wording each time. A very long-winded man. But somehow, his Symphony No. 3 - all 55 minutes of it - flew by Thursday night under the spell of Wolfgang Sawallisch. Great Bruckner is a gift, one that few living conductors possess. Right now, there might be no better place on earth to hear the symphonist's work than at Broad and Spruce.

Even by the motley standards of Shostakovich's 15 symphonies, the long-suppressed Symphony No. 4 is a work of such originality that its performance remains a special, fasten-your-seatbelt occasion - more so than usual Thursday at the Kimmel Center, in one of the Philadelphia Orchestra's best outings ever with chief conductor Charles Dutoit. The staggeringly dense, hour-long piece challenges the orchestra on virtually every front, but Dutoit's cool, Gallic strategy made the wild orchestration all the more powerful for never slipping into sensory overload.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's biggest recording project has just been completed. The release, on EMI, encompasses Beethoven's nine symphonies, plus three of his overtures on six discs in a box. They represent performances and recordings between October 1985 and February 1988 and much more besides. They stand to Riccardo Muti as a summary of the transformation he has effected with this orchestra since he became music director in 1980. A Beethoven set may seem an unlikely choice for a conductor so deeply involved with Italian opera, but Muti has consistently presented himself as a man with wide enthusiasm and knowledge.

When in the grip of an obsession with Gustav Mahler's symphonies, there comes a time when you need to visit the composer's grave. Communing with J.S. Bach would logically take place in a church in Leipzig. For Erik Satie, it's a cabaret in Montmartre. But Mahler was the first to admit that he never really belonged in Vienna or New York, whose musical lives he transformed. Given the preoccupation with death that haunts his 10 symphonies and dozens of songs - as a child, he wanted to grow up to be a martyr, and as an adult, he wrote the irregular rhythm of his diseased heart into his last completed symphony - all roads to his spirit lead to the cemetery.

Given the admiring friendship of Mozart and Haydn, it seemed reasonable for the Mozart Society to open its season last night with a concert of Haydn's music at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany. The chamber orchestra, conducted by Davis Jerome, played the alpha and (almost) omega of Haydn's orchestral works, the Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 102. By playing works composed 35 years apart, Jerome underlined the steady growth in means that marked Haydn's long career. That first symphony was rather square and formal, but it contained, in its older style, the seeds of the mature work.

Nobody should program Beethoven's perpetually overexposed Symphony No. 5 without sound reasons. But the Philadelphia Orchestra's guest conductor David Zinman has a claim on doing so, if only on the strength of his famous recordings with the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich that have sold more than 1 million discs and showed the world how far a modern-instrument orchestra can go in approximating the manner and sound of period instruments. But the underlying brilliance of Zinman's Philadelphia Orchestra concert Friday was how he framed the symphony.

Vincent d'Indy's reputation within French music circles is sometimes likened to Brahms' within the German. Why, then, are the prolific Frenchman's pleasurable scores so rarely played? Maybe we don't bother with him because American listeners, as Francophile composer Ned Rorem maintains, have been suckled on the thicker syrups of romance. Effervescence, as in the burbling Symphony on a French Mountain Air, doesn't stick to the bone. Whatever the reason, I have not lately heard (have you?

They just couldn't let him go. As Gustavo Dudamel basked in audience love along with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela Wednesday night, a few in Verizon Hall unfurled Venezuelan flags and shouted suggested encores. "After this huge piece," the conductor said in the wake of a Strauss tone poem, "we're getting old. " Who knew about this gift for being coy? The audience got its encore, and then another. People come to classical music for all kinds of reasons - thank goodness - and this audience came to connect with youth, energy, and Venezuelan pride.

Sometimes, the Philadelphia Orchestra needs an outsider to remind it of who it is and what it was. Gianandrea Noseda - a guest conductor so popular with the orchestra that he was reengaged for a two-week stint this season starting Thursday (with other return visits in the works) - happens to be the foremost Rachmaninoff specialist of his generation. This week, he's conducting that composer's Symphony No. 2 Thursday through Saturday at the Kimmel Center with what is generally considered to be "Rachmaninoff's orchestra.

Though only nine minutes away from Philadelphia by train, Symphony in C's Rutgers-Camden home is truly in another state, which is why the prospect of hearing Gyorgy Ligeti's Violin Concerto on Saturday at the Gordon Theater felt vaguely perilous. This post-conservatory orchestra and its soloist Augustin Hadelich could be counted on to meet the music's considerable demands. But what about the suburban audience? The outset was not promising: After a new orchestra piece by Roger Zare titled Green Flash (winner of the orchestra's annual Young Composers Competition)

If the Curtis Institute is about achieving greatness in various forms, an essential part of that would have to be experiencing the pitfalls that are everywhere in the symphonic repertoire. Nothing dire happened when the Curtis Symphony Orchestra played Jennifer Higdon, Brahms, and Bartok under Robert Spano Monday at the Kimmel Center; the showcase element of the concert was delivered with swaggering confidence. But that doesn't mean any given masterpiece's DNA was located. The Bartok Concerto for Orchestra was most distinctive: Rather than running the movements together as so many conductors do, Spano treated them as discrete entities in ways that reminded you of the music's strangeness, how movements start in mid-thought and end in ways suggesting that there's plenty left to say. Spano pursued a great variety of string sounds.

Though Astral Artists has long been an alternative to competition-winning virtuosity, this young-artist organization's annual Kimmel Center showcase illuminates how much a genuine musical personality is a priority for being noticed; no longer are youthful charisma and great technical ability alone the ticket to a career. All three of the Astral artists on stage Monday night - flutist Angel Hsiao, clarinetist Benito Meza, and violinist Benjamin Beilman - revealed at least a nascent temperament, and often much more, in concertos that afforded comparisons with the best.

There might be mathematical formulae illuminating the refined relationships that tie a musical work together and infuse it with life, but it remains for the conductor to put the X's and Y's in the proper places. Such mathematical placement, however intuitive, is a strength of Rossen Milanov, who led music by Beethoven, Kodaly, and Brahms in the Symphony in C spring concert Saturday at Gordon Auditorium in Camden. The flow of rhythms and textures in Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 were so easily placed that the performance was a lesson in logic.

Denali National Park and Preserve is in Alaska. Acadia is the old French name for what is now essentially New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Those two chunks of real estate are 3,000 miles apart, but that didn't keep those intrepid marketers at GMC from joining them in automotive matrimony. Actually, the Acadia Denali isn't really a bicoastal couple. It is the top-of-the-line rendition of GMC's large and largely pleasing crossover SUV. How top-of-the-line? Well, the base Acadia starts at $32,605.

Nobody should program Beethoven's perpetually overexposed Symphony No. 5 without sound reasons. But the Philadelphia Orchestra's guest conductor David Zinman has a claim on doing so, if only on the strength of his famous recordings with the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich that have sold more than 1 million discs and showed the world how far a modern-instrument orchestra can go in approximating the manner and sound of period instruments. But the underlying brilliance of Zinman's Philadelphia Orchestra concert Friday was how he framed the symphony.

Legend has it that a favorite drinking game of the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was to spend the evening prodigiously imbibing with friends, after which one of them would be abruptly shut into a closet for 15 minutes or so. Then, from the other side of the door, the closeted partyer was ordered to give the full names of the people with whom he had spent the evening. Just to see if he was too hammered to do so. Or had passed out. No wonder Sibelius never finished his Symphony No. 8 . But now, perhaps, others can. Sketches - some of them orchestrated - have been identified as probably being from the symphony that occupied him from 1927 until his death in 1957.

Dirk Brossé may be gradually reshaping the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia into a mainly classical ensemble, but he is moving quickly to give the ensemble an air of informality. He steps to the podium, microphone in hand, to speak casually to the audience, and, Sunday in the holiday concert at the Perelman Theater, he introduced the new concertmistress, Miho Saegusa; the new principal viola, Beth Guterman; and four other new players. The soloist, hornist John David Smith, is also from the chamber orchestra.