The National Constitution Center has named David Eisner, former CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, its new president and CEO. He succeeds Linda E. Johnson, a member of the Center’s Board of Trustees, who took over it January after the departure of its last leader.

Eisner apparent has never run a museum or a tourist attraction.

This from the Constitution Center's announcement this morning:

"He was a senior executive at AOL Time Warner and America Online, Inc., where he established and directed the AOL Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm. At AOL, Eisner founded several of the first online initiatives to foster philanthropy and volunteering, including Network for Good and Helping.org. Prior to that, he was a Senior Vice President at Fleishman-Hilliard International Communications in Washington, D.C. He also previously managed public relations at the Legal Services Corporation. Eisner started his career on Capitol Hill, serving as press secretary for several Members of Congress."

Ignat Solzhenitsyn is stepping down as music director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. This will be his last season with the group, and then he'll become laureate. He became music director of the group in 2004 after working his way up from the assistant conductor position starting in 1994.

The Chamber Orchestra is expcted today to announce Dirk Brossé (pictured) as his successor.

The Belgian-born Brossé has been a frequent guest here, and is currently on the 50-city Star Wars in Concert tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also guest conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Seoul Philharmonic, l’Orchestre de la Suisse-Romande and others.

Solzhenitsyn, a pianist, Curtis graduate and member of the Curtis piano faculty, is expected to guest conduct the Chamber Orchestra in one program each season.

More here.

What say you, Willie? Take the pledge for quieter buses?

The transit strike is over. Yes, it will be very nice to see the buses and trains running. Children can get to school again. The elderly can reschedule medical appointments they had to miss. And workers too poor (or environmentally sensible) to own a car can stop getting up an hour or two earlier in the morning to map out  a strategy for getting to work. (I'm not sure I can continue to look my bus driver in the eye anymore and be the one to say good morning only to get the same no-response stare. But that's a personal matter I'll have to grapple with.)

It won't be so great, however, to have to hear buses again. It was a small side benefit to a painful week of no public transportation.

But it was lovely to have the city so quiet.

You didn't have to cup your ears on Chestnut Street. You didn't have to hold your breath on Broad. It was ridiculous that SEPTA took the position a few years ago that musicians busking in subways were making too much noise - while its buses were the source of deafening cacophony. I'm not using the word deafening lightly. I'd bet that SEPTA buses are operating at decibel levels high enough to cause permanent damage.

SEPTA has plans for what it says are quieter buses. We can't wait to hear whether the decibels will really fall.

So, now that we've been reminded just how loud and dirty SEPTA's ancient fleet is, can the agency do anything about it? Union boss Willie Brown (pictured), take note: he who takes on that issue might win a grateful public.

Leonard Slatkin "sort of" collapsed in his dressing room while guesting with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and is recovering in a Rotterdam hospital after a stent procedure, the Detroit Free Press reports. The 65-year-old music director of the Detroit Symphony has canceled performances in the coming weeks, but could return to the podium in Detroit as soon as the end of November.

Classic FM says John Williams' music to Harry Potter is "the most loved children's music, as voted for by you." Well, maybe not you. There's an annoying lack of details in the apparent poll, taken by the U.K. classical broad- and webcaster. Which music from Harry Potter do they mean? Who voted, how many children, what ages?

Even so. Kids are so smart. Take "Hedwig's Theme." The main melody has the kind of twists and turns that stick in your memory, and yet if you listen to it slowly individual notes aren't exactly the obvious ones you think they are. Harmonically, the movement unveils a series of lovely, haunting moves. The orchestration is some of the brightest and most evocative in the repertoire. Don't you love the way the strings sound like gusts of wind? And a celesta representing a snowy owl. There's a touch of evil, or at least naughtiness, in those woodwinds.

Whether or not the Classic FM poll is meaningful as a reliable indicator of what  children in the U.K. are really spending time thinking about, the list is a handy thing for parents. It's all great music. Each one of these pieces opens doors to other worlds. From Peter and the Wolf your next stop might be Romeo and Juliet, and from there it's a straight shot to the Symphony No. 5. "The Flight of the Bumblebee" takes you to Scheherazade, and then to the Russian repertoire generally.

Not to mention how a little obsession with almost any one of these pieces leads to literature and dance. The list goes on for 39 pieces. By the way, don't you love the way Classic FM has attributed The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Elgar to Fantasia? They ended up in the movie, but they didn't start there.

Here are the first ten:

1 John Williams, Harry Potter

2 Howard Blake, Walking in the Air (The Snowman)

3 Sergei Prokofiev, Peter's Theme (Peter and the Wolf)

4 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (The Nutcracker)

5 Sergei Prokofiev, The Duck Scene (Peter and the Wolf)

6 Paul Dukas, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Fantasia)

7 Edward Elgar, Pomp and Circumstance Op. 39, No. 4 (Fantasia)

8 Johann Pachelbel, Canon

9 Sergei Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet

10 Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Flight of the Bumblebee

One more chance to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra in incredible form - tonight. Here's a review.

JoAnn Falletta conducting the Curtis orchestra Tuesday night, with concertmaster Joel Link. Photo: David DeBalko

This review is scheduled to run in the physical version of The Inquirer Friday.

Nights like the one the Curtis Institute of Music had Tuesday — in which everything is going right and everyone in the room seems to feel it — are dear in the life of arts institutions, especially in tough times. The Curtis orchestra, in its first concert of the season, played with a magnificent assuredness. Much of the city’s arts and civic leadership was in Verizon Hall, buzzing about the school’s new dorm and orchestra rehearsal hall quickly taking shape a few blocks away.
And you couldn’t help noticing that while all this spoke gamely of the future, in the audience were teachers such as Eleanor Sokoloff, charismatic Curtis piano pedagogue for nearly 75 years and living evidence that its new leadership still values the conservatory’s lineage.
Of course, none of this would have mattered had the level of playing not been so high. JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, brought clarity to the Violin Concerto of Behzad Ranjbaran, order to Strauss’ Don Juan, and, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, a surprising and lucid reanimation.
I never tire of hearing Sheherazade, in part since I don’t hear it much anymore. Once a staple, it now shows up less often in concert halls. The work’s youthful narrative is ideally suited to this orchestra; it asks for virtuosity, and the ensemble repays it in the form of ecstasy.
Falletta’s interpretation was self-effacing. She provided a stable framework of tempos, occasionally veering away for expressive purposes, but mostly leaving individuality to unfold in the dozens of instrumental solos. William Short was not merely technically all there in the work’s famous dancerly bassoon solo, but also highly individual in a way that would be notable even in a professional setting. Clarinetist Ruokai Chen placed a subtle elongation in tempo at the top of a run, transforming an excerpt lick into an artistic statement. All throughout the piece, concertmaster Joel Link, a fourth-year student, projected warmth and stability in notoriously treacherous solos.
Don Juan had great structure, though in the details was perhaps slightly prim and proper for the subject at hand. But Falletta was just right in Ranjbaran’s Violin Concerto. The Tehran-born Juilliard composer might be thought of as music’s magical realist. In this work — as well as in his "Persian Trilogy" — a passage can be going along at midlevel dissonance when, as if a light suddenly refracted, the orchestration turns lustrous and the harmonies seductive. You might hear film scoring in his sound. The composer himself identifies Persian modes and rhythms as inspiration, as well as the kamancheh, a traditional Persian bowed instrument.
But for the soloist, the more relevant cousins in the repertoire to this 2003 work are Barber and Korngold, whose spirit Elissa Lee Koljonen evoked in the formidable passage work. Koljonen, a 1994 Curtis graduate who studied with Aaron Rosand, is also Mrs. Roberto Diaz, wife of the director of Curtis, but her appearance on this program was no concession to family ties. She is apart from all her connections a violinist of immense presence. Technique is a given, but with a purpose. Case in point: the many fleeting moments of bending pitch and changing tone for expressive purposes. This was a knowing audience, so it might have detected her exquisite timing and precision. Or perhaps all it sensed was a violinist of considerable soul.

- Peter Dobrin
 

It's apparently finally done. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic have penned a deal keeping him there through 2018. For how many weeks per year, we do not know.

What was the hold up? The AP story doesn't say.

Rattle's signing had been predicted by the Philharmonic before - and repeatedly over a period of many months - after a mysterious and confusing moment in which the orchestra wasn't sure whether it wanted to keep him.

No one is good enough to be musical leader of the Berlin Philharmonic. We all get that. Players have made that clear before with their complaining about Rattle and previous music directors. So maybe the past few months of Rattle not signing his contract were about getting players to be sure, to be really, really sure.

Rattle is a frequent visitor to the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which has made it clear on several occasions it would like him to be music director.

Conductors, these days especially, have to be more than musicians. They are advocates, teachers and, in a substantive way, cheerleaders for the art form. Vladimir Jurowski, who guest conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra this week, has a couple of charismatic gifts unseen by the public during his previous visits here.

In this clip (from 2003) of him speaking about Die Fledermaus, he not only proves an elegant pianist, but also an insightful thinker. It's clear Jurowski is a conductor who makes interpretive choices based on clues in the score and deep consideration. Listen to five minutes of what he has to say about Fledermaus and you'll never hear the piece the same way again.

Jurowski leads the orchestra Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Stravinsky's Scherzo Fantastique, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the astonishing young violinist Sergey Khachatryan and one of the lesser-heard symphonies of Prokofiev, the No. 4.