Classical Music Agenda

If you are like me and spending most of the day looking forward to hearing Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin play this afternoon, you may not be ready to think about next week. There is plenty of good music to be heard, with free concerts after the jump.

HEADLINES:
>> After Kissin burns his way through Chopin and Prokofiev, why not hear the second installment of a complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle from Austrian pianist Till Fellner? The quest continues on Wednesday (March 4, 7:30 p.m.) at the Austrian Embassy as part of the Embassy Series. Tickets: $50 (with swell reception).

>> To scratch that itch for contemporary music, a trip to Charm City may be in order, to hear the Sequenzathon, an almost complete performance of Luciano Berio's Sequenzas on the Mobtown Modern series at Baltimore's Contemporary Museum this Tuesday (March 3, 6:30 p.m.). Tickets: $10.

>> For a new twist on something old, try what should be a fine performance of Mozart's Requiem Mass, with Jun Märkl conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Strathmore on Saturday (March 7, 8 p.m.). Other performances on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday are in Baltimore. The vocal soloists include soprano Christine Brandes and mezzo-soprano Susan Platts, and the work is paired, unusually, with Stravinsky's score for the ballet Apollo.

>> If you have not quite done your part to observe the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, get yourself to Washington National Cathedral next Sunday (March 8, 4 p.m.) for the tribute from Cathedral Choral Society. It takes the form of a rare performance of Paul Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd, a setting of Walt Whitman's poem on Lincoln's death commissioned on the occasion of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sam Waterston, of Law & Order fame, will narrate. Tickets: $20 to $80.