Violinist Leila Josefowicz (photo by Deborah O’Grady)>> We only recommend a trip to Baltimore for something extraordinary, and this week the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is not bringing a worthy program to Strathmore. Daring conductor Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, will conduct two Russian fairytale scores, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and the suite from Stravinsky’s ballet score for The Firebird. (October 29 and 30, 8 p.m.) The concert will also feature Leila Josefowicz as the soloist in John Adams’s violin concerto. If you want to learn more about how Rimsky-Korsakov tells a story in music in Scheherazade, there will be a special multimedia concert attempting to show just that (October 31, 7 p.m.).
>> Austrian pianist Till Fellner returns to Washington next Sunday (November 1, 6:30 p.m.) for the fourth installment of his complete cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, at the National Gallery of Art. Even better, unlike the previous two concerts in the cycle last spring, this one is free.
MAKE IT FREE:
>> For something completely different, pianist and composer Samuel Vriezen will play a free recital on Monday night (October 26, 7:30 p.m.) at Catholic University‘s Ward Hall. The program includes music by Tom Johnson, Chopin, and Vriezen himself.
>> Columbia University professor Walter Frisch will give a free lecture on “Arnold Schoenberg: The Early Years, Through Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire” on Wednesday (October 28, 12 noon) at the Library of Congress.
>> If you would rather hear music at lunchtime, try the free noontime concert on Wednesday (October 28, 12:10 p.m.) by an ensemble called Masques, featuring music by Couperin and Rameau, at the National Gallery of Art (in the lecture hall on the West Building’s ground floor).
>> Also in the unusual department is the multimedia concert to be performed by pianist Guy Livingston on Friday (October 30, 8 p.m.) at the Library of Congress. Called “One Minute More,” this quirky program features Livingston playing 60 one-minute excerpts by sixty different composers, accompanied by sixty one-minute films.
