Wolfgang Sawallisch

William Smith, 68, associate conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the man who introduced two generations of youngsters to orchestral music, died yesterday at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. Mr. Smith, a Havertown resident, had suffered strokes in 1989, 1990 and in October. He last led the orchestra on Dec. 13 and 14, in performances of Handel's Messiah at the Academy of Music. He was hospitalized in January and submitted his resignation to music director Wolfgang Sawallisch in February.

The orchestra's season, in the last 20 years or so, has changed its shape and shifted its weight to reflect the presence of the music director. The pattern is that the music director opens the season, spends a month, then returns to Europe. He returns in January for another month, then rejoins the orchestra for a month's finale in mid-spring before taking the musicians on tour. It is those separate months of music that reveal what the season is about and fill in details in the evolving portrait of the music director in Philadelphia.

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.

Now that the media swirl over Wolfgang Sawallisch's appointment as music director for the Philadelphia Orchestra has passed, and his first concerts have proved so successful, it is a good time to contemplate a barrier that Americans rarely cross. Sawallisch was asked to start a new career at age 70. In most any other profession, he would likely be excluded because of his age. In the European-dominated classical music world, careers often extend past 70 - Artur Rubinstein concertized at the piano until 90, and yes, a seventyish Arturo Toscanini was asked to head the NBC Symphony orchestra in 1938 - but America is a culture that seems to deny people center stage after their seventh decade.

The "new Wolfgang Sawallisch" is no illusion. The maestro himself acknowledges it; he refers to it as "small changing. " But unlike armchair psychologists who put down the new intensity to the death of his wife, Sawallisch, 77, says the new fire on the podium is nothing more than the confidence that comes with knowing his orchestra with ever-increasing intimacy. "The relationship between the musicians and myself gives me personally more liberty, more possibility to penetrate more into different music, ja?

Philadelphia Orchestra music director Wolfgang Sawallisch spent 10 days in a Munich hospital after "feeling tired," according to orchestra president Joseph H. Kluger. Tests showed nothing wrong, Kluger said, and Sawallisch returned to his home in Grassau Friday night. Sawallisch was to have led three concerts in Paris with l'Orchestre de Paris on Dec. 6, 7 and 8, which he canceled due to illness, according to a spokeswoman for the French orchestra. Philadelphia Orchestra spokeswoman Judith Karp Kurnick said that no particular medical event precipitated Sawallisch's stay.

The Philadelphia Orchestra will play Beethoven next season - performing all nine symphonies and other works in a festival format, then taking the music to Japan in May. This will mark the first time the orchestra has performed all nine symphonies in a season in almost 60 years. Details of the orchestra's 96th season were announced yesterday at the Academy of Music by music director Wolfgang Sawallisch. He spoke in a setting designed to look like 18th-century Vienna, in which costumed pianist Davyd Booth, dressed as Beethoven, played.

The white roses and trumpet vines are in bloom at the estate of Wolfgang Sawallisch, whose rambling house snuggles against the Bavarian Alps. The Philadelphia Orchestra's former music director is looking through a large window onto all the loveliness, seeking in it a silver lining to what is clearly a troubling phase in life. Now at least he can be at home to watch the four seasons play out on his many acres of forest and gardens, he says, by way of explaining that he will never conduct again.

Wolfgang Sawallisch said yesterday that he would step down as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra within the next three years, and that the orchestra should begin the process of finding his successor. Sawallisch's comments were not part of an official orchestra announcement, and he gave no specific date for his departure. But the maestro spoke openly about an end to his tenure. "You understand, my contract finishes with the '97-98 season," said Sawallisch in a telephone conversation from his Munich apartment.

Ten o'clock at night, and for two hours, Wolfgang Sawallisch has been pulling music from scores piled atop a grand piano to explain his ideas about composer Richard Strauss. He's been playing the piano. He's been singing. In an ornate Princeton University hall, he has held more than 400 listeners in the palms of his hands. Without intermission. Have you been wondering how the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra feels now that his musicians are on strike? Well, Monday night's lecture-demonstration gave one answer: The maestro's yearning to perform.

There's no getting around the fact that what makes the Philadelphia Orchestra the Philadelphia Orchestra is a certain skillful manipulation of sound. And why would you want to get around it? This trademark sonority, much remarked on over the years, is a dear asset. With change in the air at the orchestra and so much at stake, this seems a good moment for an identity verification. "There is no such thing as the Philadelphia sound. The sound is the sound of the conductor," Eugene Ormandy reportedly once said.

It began like almost any other orchestra summer idyll, with Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture . And then, with the middle movement of a Mozart piano concerto, Tuesday night's Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Mann Center suddenly took on rare auras of celebrity, politics, and the general idea that history of a sort was in the making. The source of the extra-musical messaging was the soloist: Condoleezza Rice, former national security advisor, 66th U.S. secretary of state and public face of the Bush 43 administration.

Some conductors believe, above all, in the Rehearsal. They balance and tune chords, bring out some voices and subdue others. They charm and educate players with spoken poetry and imagery to achieve various effects. They even make adjustments in response to the acoustics of a particular hall. Others do plenty of preparation in rehearsal, but the main thing they bring to the party is a performance pumped with energy. Conductors on the highest level are a substantive amalgamation of the two: They did their homework before curtain time, and they have the skillful gestures to write new ideas in performance and the sensitivity to react spontaneously to events (good and bad)

Some conductors believe, above all, in The Rehearsal. They balance and tune chords, bring out some voices and subdue others, they charm and educate players with spoken poetry and imagery to achieve various effects. They even make adjustments in response to the acoustic of a particular hall. Others do plenty of preparation in rehearsal, but the main thing they bring to the party is a performance pumped with energy. Conductors operating on the highest level are a substantive amalgamation of the two - they did their homework before curtain time, and they have the skillful gestures to write new ideas in performance and the sensitivity to react spontaneously to events (good and bad)

Tang Zhongxuan remembers the night after the earthquake, when sleeping indoors was no longer safe but outside the rain had arrived. Thousands were dead, and more than half the town's buildings had been destroyed; his own home was skewed and teetering. But he, his wife, and their 8-month-old baby were uninjured, so the 32-year-old English teacher found two trees, tied ropes between them, and created shelter with a blanket - their home for the next three weeks. Tang considered himself lucky.

His supple hands would be the envy of a violinist of 30. Which Jerome Wigler was - 59 years ago. At 89, Wigler is the oldest full-time musician at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and easily the oldest member of any of the nation's "Big Five" symphonies (New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia). He's been with the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1951, playing for the likes of Arturo Toscanini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Eugene Ormandy, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Igor Stravinsky.

Enjoy the music while you can. The economic downturn has had no immediate impact on classical-music programming, which is devised and funded at least a year in advance and is, for the moment, perfectly safe. It may even be more accessible these days: Tickets could be easier to come by, especially if many are left over from subscription sales. But the stock-market gyrations that began last fall will be felt come next fall. So here it is: the glory that is 21st-century Philadelphia - for however long it lasts.

Rarely have I listened with such hostile ears as I did to the boatload of new compact discs issued by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. That's the orchestra recently named No. 1 in Gramophone magazine's list of the world's 20 greatest orchestras - as decided by a panel of international critics who, by the way, shut out the Philadelphia Orchestra. Loyalty to the home team isn't behind this confrontation. I've loved the Amsterdam orchestra for decades. My motivation was curiosity: What does it take to be No. 1 on a list that's mainly decided by impressions (albeit highly intelligent ones)

David Zinman is not a conductor who always digs deep for meaning. And yet in some ways it was very satisfying to hear him Thursday night guest-conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. He's efficient and workmanlike. He can move the music along, which is beneficent when you're dealing with an ensemble like Philadelphia's, which would happily slow down at the end of every phrase. And the opening of Barber's potent Symphony No. 1 intimated that revelation might be in the cards all evening.

What a fun concert. The Philadelphia Orchestra's concerto soloist Thursday was David Kim, celebrating his 10th anniversary as concertmaster (and obviously excited about it), with guest conductor Rafael Fr?hbeck de Burgos, who always has a welcome mat in my psyche, given how much his cogent, coloristically rich manner applies to music he does better than anybody (Falla) as well as to less-characteristic repertoire in need of his strengths (Schumann's Symphony No. 3). At the outset, the program didn't seem like something that would compete so successfully against Thursday's World Series game (Verizon Hall had hardly any empty seats)