Here at DCist, we do not normally concern ourselves much with Baltimore, for obvious reasons contained in the name of this site. However, I do go up to Charm City regularly to hear concerts, and I mention things to hear there if they are exceptional. So, as I advised you all in last week's Classical Music Agenda, on Friday night DCist Got In On It and heard the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Departing music director Yuri Temirkanov did indeed return from St. Petersburg for his final series of concerts in The City That Reads. With him this week was the extraordinary 22-year-old Munich-born violinist Julia Fischer, a sensation on recordings (her refined CD of Bach solo violin works has charmed many reviewers, including me). Nothing prepared me, however, for the joy and excitement that hearing her live would bring.

She came to Bal'mer to play a work of legendary proportions, monumental difficulty, and extraordinary significance for the career of any violinist, Ludwig van Beethoven's violin concerto. It may be the most perfect example of the genre ever conceived for this instrument: it is certainly in the top three. As filled with power and emotional punch as it is, though, there are few pieces as excruciating to hear played poorly or even merely satisfactorily. Julia Fischer did what few performers can do for an obsessive listener like me: she refashioned my understanding of this piece, redefined my expectations of how it should sound, changed the soundtrack of that perfect performance that is always in my head as I listen to music that I know well. That perfect performance is not supposed to exist, except as an ideal, but here it nearly did. When Beethoven sent the violinist precariously high up on the bridge, Fischer's tone almost never wavered from its sublime purity, the combination of a firm but not forced bow and flawless accuracy of left hand, which does not require heavy vibrato to cover slight mistunings.

The tempi in the first movement were all well chosen, fast enough to give a sense of propulsion, insistent only, rarely frenetic. As for the famous first-movement cadenza, I have never heard, live or on recording, anyone play it better than Fischer. She dazzled with some of the fastest, most daring passage work I have heard from her. The contrapuntal lines of the multiple-stop section -- where the first movement's themes are played against one another on the lone violin -- had so much independence, clarity, and precision. This marvel of virtuosic playing segued brilliantly into the sotto voce restatement of the main them, accompanied almost silently by the orchestra.

Fischer is an intellectual player -- probably why her Bach is so good -- but with a heart. At times, she stretched the tempo to within an inch of its life, all to excellent effect, especially in the rather broad rendition of the Larghetto second movement. A connecting cadenza provided all the transition that Fischer needed to switch gears into a Puckish performance of the third movement, a grinning but not mawkish rondo. What could follow such a passionate, technically assured, heart-gripping version of the Beethoven violin concerto? After many ovations, the crowd convinced Julia Fischer to play a pre-intermission encore, one that -- if possible for a work for solo violin up against a concerto with orchestra -- was even meatier, the fugue from J. S. Bach's first solo violin sonata, in G minor. It was several minutes of bliss.

Yuri Temirkanov appears to have come back from his extended absence with a chip on his shoulder, having been ribbed a bit in the press about missing so many concerts. He opened the concert with the ten minutes of Weber's overture to Euryanthe, smiling broadly and moving more animatedly than he usually does in his workman mode (left hand in pocket, right hand curtly giving the beat) in the fanfare opening. Even with the concluding work, Shostakovich's first symphony, the 45 minutes of the Beethoven concerto outweighed the rest of the concert together. Shostakovich wrote this symphony when he was 18, as a school graduation exercise, something of which any young composer would be proud. I had the sense of a young man given a new sports car, which he immediately takes out for a spin to see if it can go 100 mph. Like a 4-year-old with a box of paint in many colors, he quickly makes his way through all of them, splashing them all over the place. The BSO had audible fun with the carnivalesque aspects of the score, the clammering brass, the jangling and booming percussion. The final movement especially comes across more as an episodic string of sections, without much sense of a line of development. Still, with this performance, I am more than happy to welcome the unofficial beginning of the Shostakovich year (he was born 100 years ago, on September 25, 1906) to put an end to the Mozart year.

Concertmaster Jonathan Carney is likely not thrilled to follow Julia Fischer's act, as he will with the Khachaturian concerto next week (June 1 at Strathmore; June 2 to 4 in Baltimore). The Baltimore Symphony bids Yuri Temirkanov farewell with the transcendent second symphony ("Resurrection") of Gustav Mahler (June 10 at Strathmore; June 8, 9, and 11 in Baltimore). After that, Marin Alsop will appear as guest conductor (before she takes the helm of the BSO in the fall) with another great violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell, playing the Corigliano concerto (June 15 to 17, only in Baltimore).