Verizon Hall

The Kimmel Center's sophomore summer will include the Philadelphia debut of the Senegalese ensemble Orchestra Baobab, a blues-and-rock double bill with Buddy Guy and Los Lobos, and a benefit gala to feature pop chanteuse k.d. lang. With the Philadelphia Orchestra in its homes away from home at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts and in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., for most of the period, the Kimmel goes overwhelmingly pop in June and July. For the second year, the center's offerings will include a 15-hour reduced-price Summer Solstice program, scheduled for June 21, to include performances by Philadanco, the Pennsylvania Ballet, the Bootsie Barnes Trio, and cast members from the Abba musical Mamma Mia!

More entertainment, less art? The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, grappling with a series of discrete financial pressures, is shifting away from being a distinct presenting entity, relying more on partnerships with commercial outfits such as AEG and Live Nation, while giving breaks in rent to its own resident companies. Gone next season: the critically acclaimed Great Orchestra series, as well as Keyboard Conversations. The Kimmel's lively Summer Solstice celebration has been canceled this year for lack of money (though plans call for it to return every other year, starting in 2014)

Yakov Kreizberg is the kind of conductor you bring in when you want to hear music expressed in bold strokes. He's not exactly a detail man. And as for the ability to establish a rapport with an orchestra based on subtle gestures that get a nuanced response, well, Kreizberg is just not that kind of communicator. But for the program he put together Tuesday night in Verizon Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Kreizberg was just fine. Dvorak's Carnival overture was propelled by animal energy, and quite exciting in its own way. The Ravel Bolero that ended the concert was like any other - that is, it ticked by with the inevitability of a time bomb, the ending assured to get a standing ovation pretty much regardless of who was on the podium.

The three annual Curtis Symphony Orchestra concerts are always sizzling programs with talented young musicians giving their all in their big Kimmel Center outing. For this season's opener, British conductor James Judd leads these remarkable players in Edward Elgar's reminiscences of an Italian trip, "In the South" (subtitled "Alassio"), as well as Ravel's masterpiece of mood, the "Mother Goose" suite. Brahms' Fourth Symphony is the soaring finale. Before the concert, Curtis will bestow its 2010 alumni award to the members of the Guarneri Quartet, not only for their longtime supremacy but also for their leadership as Curtis faculty.

Music Gil Scott-Heron. He made a triumphant return to recording this year with the wryly titled I'm New Here, a short, sharp postmodern blues album that is the 1970s soul-funk-jazz-R&B- griot-and-rap-godfather's first album in 16 years. The satiric and socially conscious 61-year-old songwriter did not get to put those songs across to Philadelphians in person, however, because his scheduled February appearances at the Tin Angel were scuttled by two-plus feet of snow. He'll be back this weekend to make up the dates.

Russell Johnson, 83, the acclaimed acoustician who designed sound for the homes of many of the world's great orchestras - including Philadelphia's - died Tuesday in New York City, his firm announced. Mr. Johnson, widely admired for his work on orchestra halls in Dallas; Lucerne, Switzerland; and, perhaps most of all, Birmingham, England, died at his apartment after working Monday at his firm, said Tateo Nakajima, Artec Consultants' managing director. "We were discussing design ideas and planning for the future," Nakajima said, "and as far as we can tell, he went home from work and just didn't wake up. " Mr. Johnson founded his design studio in 1970 in New York but was more often seen listening to concerts in Miami, Singapore, or one of the dozens of other cities in which he designed halls.

Underneath the big hair, behind the rock-star clothes, and despite the distracting paparazzi back home in China, he's still Lang Lang. As NCM Fathom technicians run miles of cables backstage at Verizon Hall in preparation for Saturday's live simulcast to 500 movie theaters across the country, pianist Lang Lang is bear-hugging Philadelphia Orchestra chief conductor Charles Dutoit and chatting about their favorite Beijing restaurants. Wide-eyed as ever, Lang Lang, 29, played through parts of the two concertos he'll play in his Thursday-through-Saturday concerts here.

The cost of hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra will jump next season by an average of 16 percent - the biggest increase since 1987. In addition, the ticket surcharge will double to $2 per ticket. A small number of ticket prices will stay the same or even drop slightly. But most listeners will pay substantially more, depending on seat location, to experience the orchestra live in the future. The increase comes as the orchestra prepares to become a tenant in a new hall that will be both more expensive to operate and will offer fewer seats than the Academy of Music.

The Kimmel Center's grand opening 10 years ago was a model of how not to do it. The performing arts center was so far from finished in its opening week that at one concert musicians gamely wore hard hats. Verizon Hall's out-of-control air-conditioning led bejeweled patrons at the opening gala to joke about seeing indoor snow flurries. The acoustics inhabited the opposite end of the weather index: The Washington Post's critic called the hall "an acoustical Sahara. " "You ask, 'My gosh, why wasn't this done right the first time around?

Could it be that the era of taking Wolfgang Sawallisch for granted is coming to an end? Whether or not a groundswell of adoration rises this season, the Sawallisch era itself is now officially in the homestretch. The Philadelphia Orchestra's music director presided over his last opening night Wednesday, acting in his usual music-first, ego-last way, as if nothing were different. But everything is different, and more change is on the way - soon. The orchestra's still-new hall sounded better than it did at the end of last season, the result, perhaps, of a new riser configuration and more layers of sound-reflective polyurethane on the stage of Verizon Hall (four coats, as opposed to two)