Words And Music

For Karl Middleman, context is almost everything. The conductor of the Philadelphia Classical Symphony uses his concerts to explain the settings, the composer's life and times, and the plan behind the music. The orchestra plays examples to illustrate all that, and the stage is fronted by artwork to help the audience understand the period. On Saturday, Middleman took on Beethoven, mixing 100 minutes of music with 60 of commentary. Concerts were marathons in Beethoven's day, and the search for authenticity now may require programs of comparable length.

Words and music have a lot to say to each other in James Primosch's Weil Alles Unsagbar Ist (Because Everything is Unsayable), played Sunday afternoon by the New York Camerata at the Van Pelt Auditorium of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The three-movement work for flute, violin, soprano, cello and piano is stunning in its ability to illuminate texts taken from Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Pictures and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge....

USUALLY PEOPLE complain that music has lost its edge. This time the Edge has lost his music. While he, Bono and the other U2-ers were doing a photo shoot in France Tuesday, a CD featuring music from their upcoming album went missing - and the band's not sure whether foul play or carelessness is the culprit. Billboard.com says gendarmes have questioned 20 or so people at the shoot to see if the incident was an accident or a theft. "A large slice of two years' work lifted via a piece of round plastic," the Edge says on U2's Web site.

As an American, a veteran and a person reasonably interested in sports activities, I would like to comment on a moment during the pre-game ceremony of an event of great national interest, the recent Army Navy game. The rendition of the national anthem at this great sports spectacle brought tears to my eyes and made me proud of my country and heritage. The quality of performance rightfully commanded the respect to flag and country of those massed in attendance as well as our countrymen abroad who were present through worldwide media coverage.

As intricately crafted as Eric Sessler's Songs of the King may be, it communicates its emotional messages as clear as a bell. Premiered last night by the Music Group of Philadelphia, the choral work, whose text is taken from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," is heraldic one minute, poignant the next. Sessler, 25, a resident of Feasterville, takes great care in choosing the right music for his Arthurian text. There are few universally recognized connections between the words and music - a Stravinskyesque trumpet blows as the poem proclaims Blow, trumpet, and the Dies Irae appears when the subject of death comes up. No, Sessler is interested in something much more subtle and instinctive, reflecting meaning in his music the way composers like Britten and Faure were able to do so well in their vocal music.

Mary O'Kelley Peacock, 98, of Cherry Hill, a pianist, composer and writer who produced original Christmas musicals in Moorestown for nearly 25 years, died Oct. 14 at Cadbury at Cherry Hill. She was a longtime resident of Moorestown before moving to Cherry Hill in 1985. One of the first songs that Mrs. Peacock wrote was "A Wreath of Holly," an omen of what would become an annual project she called "her gift to the community. " Mrs. Peacock wrote the words and music for the free shows, which consisted of vignettes about shopping, Santa, and families spending the holidays together and were performed from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s at the Community House of Moorestown.

The Hedgerow Theatre will present Cole/Noel: Let's Fall in Love tonight through Jan. 14. This musical revue will combine the words and music of songwriter Cole Porter and playwright Noel Coward. The shows will be at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $10 for subscribers and $15 for nonsubscribers. A special New Year's Eve gala and benefit will include the show and refreshments. The cost is $25. The Hedgerow Theatre is at 64 Rose Valley Rd., Rose Valley.

Any Philadelphian looking for an intelligently programmed and executed concert might have gone up to Laurel Hill Mansion in Fairmount Park last night to hear the Jubal Trio open the 15th season of Concerts by Candlelight at Laurel Hill. The trio played works from the Russian romantics to the American moderns, and did so with a spirit and style appropriate to each piece. Perhaps the most engaging work of the evening was by Ursula Mamlok, who was born in 1928 in Berlin, but has lived since 1941 in New York, where she now teaches at the Manhattan School of Music.

Unaccompanied singing was the first building block in what became the edifice of music, and in the complexity of that building history, unaccompanied singing has become hard to find. The Music Group continues to make its programs from voices alone, and its programs have a special intensity because of the single source of musical effect. Such was the case last night at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany. In its ninth season, the ensemble performed groups of songs by Vaughan Williams, Argento and Brahms; madrigals; Hungarian folk songs, and a spiritual.

The theme at Collingswood's Scottish Rite Auditorium Thursday night was folksy soul music, with Raul Mid?n and India.Arie doing what they do best - baring their souls. What they gave, the audience gave back in abundance. With the audience engaged in call-and-response, or simply going at it a cappella, the concert was more like hanging out with talented friends around a campfire, or the organ after church service. Mid?n opened the show by himself, with a guitar and a bottle of water.

WANT TO warm your Valentine's heart today? Do it with an album of classic romantic music, newly reinvigorated. Or with fresh-baked originals offering curious takes on love. MACCA MAGIC: Can't say I was enthralled with his last, symphonic effort. But Paul McCartney 's entry in the American songbook, "Kisses From the Bottom" (Hear/Concord, A) is the total charmer. Surrounded by a top team of tasteful jazz/pop talents - producer Tommy LiPuma, keyboardist/arranger Diana Krall, guitarist John Pizzarelli, engineer Al Schmitt - Macca brings multiple voices, oft surprisingly frail but effective, and childhood memories as he celebrates songs largely introduced to him by his dad and which surely influenced his own compositional nature.

The Crossing's 2010 Month of Moderns Festival no doubt won new friends for the much-honored American poet Philip Levine, whose words were the basis of newly commissioned compositions, in an endeavor that turned out to have challenges worth taking but not worth repeating. And that's partly why the festival's trio of choral concerts was so engaging: Nothing came close to tanking, but artistic debates without black-and-white conclusions were surely possible. As much as Levine's plainspoken words led the designated composers into creative overdrive, you knew what was missing when Saturday's final program at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill turned to music inspired by a more abstract poet, Paul Celan.

Soul singer Teddy Pendergrass' funeral yesterday was the kind of soaring ceremony that punctuates the end of a larger-than-large life. A 200-member gospel choir jubilated with high-decibel exultation while a band and a sternum-vibrating organ roused the estimated 4,000 people who filled mammoth Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church on Cheltenham Avenue, the biggest African American church in Philadelphia. In turn, singers Melba Moore, Tyrese Gibson, Bunny Sigler, Gerald Austin, Lyfe Jennings, and Musiq performed songs by Pendergrass, a brawny, seductive baritone who leavened an incandescent sexuality with just enough sensitivity to stir arenas full of women and heat in any room where his music played.

Young singers can take the most chances in recitals, knowing that the audience didn't pay the huge ticket prices that warrant a safe Puccini aria or two. But no singer I've encountered assembled such musical obscurities as baritone Thomas Meglioranza during Wednesday's Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital at the American Philosophical Society. On paper, the program looked like a perverse joke - strange songs by long-forgotten composers and so-so ones by familiar figures such as Poulenc and Debussy, all hailing from the World War I era. The appeal wasn't nostalgia - the audience wasn't that old - but a tour through the attic of your eccentric grandparents in a 90-minute concert without intermission.

Speaking with Wayne Shorter, one fact instantly becomes clear: He makes little distinction between modes of expression, his conversation taking the same unpredictable twists and turns, the same imaginative urgency, the same impatience for repetition, as his music. Posing a simple question to the legendary saxophonist/composer is like handing him a melody, from which he invents labyrinthine, often surprising responses. Over the phone from Shorter's Southern California home recently, those answers came wedged between coughing fits brought on by a touch of pneumonia.

If your fine work has ever churned through the mashing machine of a Creative Team, and you've felt completely dismantled by the end result, take heart: You are not Bob Dylan. You are not being minimized on Broadway. No one sings your "Blowin' in the Wind" nightly as though it were the single piece of serious relief in Viva Las Vegas. No one comes forth with "Like a Rolling Stone" while pretend-plucking an oversize, glittery red-and-blue cartoonish guitar that would delight you, were you still in preschool.

Poet, novelist, songwriter and fabled Romeo (a 1977 album, produced by Phil Spector of all people, is called Death of a Ladies' Man), Leonard Cohen emerged from the same '60s folk scene that spawned Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, the same '60s Beat era that spawned Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But Cohen, a Montrealer, always stood apart. He wore suits. He didn't sing, he croaked. He seemed older (he was - he's 71 now). And his songs ("Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy," "Chelsea Hotel")

The theme at Collingswood's Scottish Rite Auditorium Thursday night was folksy soul music, with Raul Mid?n and India.Arie doing what they do best - baring their souls. What they gave, the audience gave back in abundance. With the audience engaged in call-and-response, or simply going at it a cappella, the concert was more like hanging out with talented friends around a campfire, or the organ after church service. Mid?n opened the show by himself, with a guitar and a bottle of water.

USUALLY PEOPLE complain that music has lost its edge. This time the Edge has lost his music. While he, Bono and the other U2-ers were doing a photo shoot in France Tuesday, a CD featuring music from their upcoming album went missing - and the band's not sure whether foul play or carelessness is the culprit. Billboard.com says gendarmes have questioned 20 or so people at the shoot to see if the incident was an accident or a theft. "A large slice of two years' work lifted via a piece of round plastic," the Edge says on U2's Web site.

Mary O'Kelley Peacock, 98, of Cherry Hill, a pianist, composer and writer who produced original Christmas musicals in Moorestown for nearly 25 years, died Oct. 14 at Cadbury at Cherry Hill. She was a longtime resident of Moorestown before moving to Cherry Hill in 1985. One of the first songs that Mrs. Peacock wrote was "A Wreath of Holly," an omen of what would become an annual project she called "her gift to the community. " Mrs. Peacock wrote the words and music for the free shows, which consisted of vignettes about shopping, Santa, and families spending the holidays together and were performed from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s at the Community House of Moorestown.