Edited to add: NOT Web-only; this one is in today's Washington Post as well.
Web-only review:

Apollo Ensemble opens a window on the Jewish Baroque
by Joan Reinthaler

In many ways, Salamone Rossi's life bridged two worlds. A Jewish composer who lived in Mantua at the turn of the 18th century, he wrote music for the synagogue that was comfortably in the idiom of high Renaissance church music, and secular pieces that were unmistakably Baroque. (The great musicologist Gustave Reese has noted that in his sacred motets the music ran as usual from left to right, but the Hebrew text under them ran from right to left -- undoubtedly a challenge for the singers).
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Due to earlier deadlines because of breaking news, last night's NSO review is being held for tomorrow's paper, but here's the preview version for blog readers.
Edited to add: Correction: the review did make it into today's paper, but there was a delay posting it to the Web.

Cheap thrills: the NSO flirts with vulgarity in Russian program
by Anne Midgette

Perhaps it’s due to long years of habit that the National Symphony Orchestra appears to treat its Thursday night concerts like a final dress rehearsal. The opening chords of Brahms’s Violin Concerto last night sounded lackluster, as if the performers weren’t fully awake. By the middle of the movement, though, they had all shown up, engaged and present.

Iván Fischer, the orchestra’s principal conductor, would never miss out on the start of a piece like that. But on the podium last night was Alexander Vedernikov, making his debut with the orchestra, and — along with the evening’s soloist, the violinist Vadim Repin — a part of the symphony’s year-long “Focus on Russia” (something indicated in the program, rather alarmingly, with little crosses, as if marking them deceased).

Vedernikov is an odd bird. Some of his conducting was frankly pedestrian. He has a great big heavy beat that can result in plodding music, and sometimes did. On the other hand, that big beat seemed to be something that the orchestra could follow. Maybe there’s something to be said for simplicity. The level of musical inspiration wasn’t always high — indeed, Vedernikov made Prokofiev, whose Fifth Symphony was the other piece on the program, sound more like Khachaturian, no more than big and splashy. But the orchestra sounded, in many places, healthy and wonderful. It was as if the players were relaxing and saying, “Hey, this we can do!”
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In today's Washington Post: Classical music has its day at the White House, by Anne Midgette.

Anyone who loves classical music has to be happy to see the White House making an effort to present it. People sitting near the stage at last night's concert said that Barack Obama was really involved in the performances; and he stayed on at the reception afterwards to speak to the artists and guests. This is a good thing. A White House spokeswoman also said this wouldn't be the last classical music event the White House would host: again, a good thing.

The arts writer Judith Dobrzynski, blogging about Michelle Obama's remarks before the afternoon's White House concert, wondered if she were sending the "right message about the value of classical music." Though this comment was really an aside, it made me think a lot about yesterday's classical music event. What exactly is "the right message"? The very phrase reveals the kinds of expectations classical music lovers are holding: give us some respect, fund our institutions, admit our superiority.
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Web-only review:

Soprano Phillips: languid legato
by Charles T. Downey

Soprano Susanna Phillips, in the area to perform with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this weekend, gave an exceptionally beautiful recital on Tuesday night in the auditorium of Alexandria's Bishop Ireton High School. Those in attendance received a preview of the delectable program of songs Phillips will present later this month at the Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. Even better, the proceeds went to support the creation of a summer music camp for the students of Mount Vernon Woods Elementary School.
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"Greatest" or "best of" lists are always satisfyingly controversial, since someone's favorite is always missing. But NPR is soliciting votes to come up with a list of 50 interesting, important voices -- great, if not "the greatest" -- to be featured in a series starting next year.

The real function of a "best of" list is to serve as a litmus test against which to measure one's own preferences. The criteria are almost impossible to establish. What makes a voice great? Is it sheer beauty, or expressive power? Does Bob Dylan have a "great" voice? Does Callas belong on the list for her dramatic genius, or Tebaldi for her beauty of tone? And though I was, growing up, more a Domingo girl than a Pavarotti one, I was struck that Pavarotti wasn't on the NPR's preliminary list of nominees.

I couldn't begin to compile a list of greatest voices overall, but if I had to make a list of the greatest voices in opera, it would start with Caruso, Ponselle, and Flagstad. But the others? Callas, Tebaldi, Milanov, McCormack? Ewa Podles? A lot of people would name Di Stefano; I might say Corelli instead. Who would your nominees be?

In today's Washington Post: Slatkin has heart attack on podium, recovering in hospital, by Anne Midgette.

A PS on Slatkin: On his blog this fall, Slatkin posted a spoof essay called "Change Is in the Air," proposing various shakeups to conventional orchestra programming: having the players sit with their backs to the audience and cutting superfluous repetitions in musical scores, so that it might be possible to get through all of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner (known for their towering size) in a single concert. Slatkin later explained that the essay was intended to poke fun at the various approaches orchestras these days are taking to wooing new audiences. In a sign of how far people believe orchestras are prepared to go, a number of readers took Slatkin’s remarks at face value.

Several people questioned the use of an image of Enrico Fermi in my post about orchestras’ educational initiatives last week. There were two reasons. One is that it’s a picture of someone explaining something that’s fairly clear and elegant, yet impenetrable to the uninitiated, which is what classical music looks like to an awful lot of people. The other is that Fermi’s name was bound up with a big orchestral-educational initiative in Washington last night: the world premiere of a symphony, commissioned in honor of the one-year anniversary in orbit of the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: a work, in short, that combined music and science, with results not entirely beneficial to either discipline.

The symphony, "Cosmic Reflection," was commissioned by Pierre Schwob, the force behind the website Classical Archives, which, he said, officially launched last night, though the site has been around since 1994, and made a surprisingly big press push this spring for a site that hadn’t launched yet. No matter: Classical Archives is a worthy addition to the landscape, an all-classical alternative to subscriptions sites like Rhapsody. Unlimited listening to thousands of albums for $9.95 a month, with an option to buy downloads, is a pretty good deal, and the catalogue is fairly deep, though there are still inevitably kinks to work out. Schwob, born in Switzerland, is a self-made Internet tycoon with a passion for science and music; he endowed Stanford's Kavli Institute with $1 million in 2004, and has commissioned two works (the symphony being the second) from Nolan Gasser, a composer who also serves as Classical Archives's artistic director.
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In today's Washington Post: Guy Livingston presents 60-second piano works at the Library of Congress, by Anne Midgette.

Web-only review:

Boston festival brings Previn, Nyman operas to D.C.
by Robert Battey and Joan Reinthaler

Boston University is planting a large footprint in the area with its "InCite Arts Festival," an interdisciplinary presentation of music, theater and painting, including an orchestra concert Monday night at the Kennedy Center and two plays this past weekend at the Olney Theater (Jim Petosa, the Olney's artistic director, is also director of B.U.'s School of Theater).

The Festival's theme is "Art, Science, and Politics," the threads that somewhat connect the two musical plays, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," and the Tom Stoppard/Andre Previn collaboration "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor" - a now-dated work about two inmates of a Soviet mental hospital, one of whom is a political prisoner and the other a schizophrenic who imagines he hears an orchestra (and there is a full symphony onstage).
(read more after the jump)

Web-only review:

National Philharmonic goes one-two-three
by Mark J. Estren

It was one-two-three-go for the National Philharmonic Orchestra at Strathmore on Halloween night. And "go" the evening's soloists certainly did: first one, then two, then all three, in an unusual and exhilarating program of a concerto, a double concerto and a triple concerto.
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Web-only review:

Josefowicz dazzles BSO
by Joe Banno

Leila Josefowicz. (Deborah O'Grady)

John Adams’s 1994 Violin Concerto gives its soloist quite a workout. As Leila Josefowicz played the first movement’s relentlessly busy solo line Thursday with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, there were moments when she appeared to be wrestling her violin into submission. Not that the athletic effort registered in her sound: She delivered finely wrought tone throughout that taxing movement, the radiant second and the hyper-kinetic third, infusing all those swooping and darting figures with passion and focus.
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