At the Biennale, Bruce Nauman's Pink and Yellow Light Corridor (Variable Lights).

Bruce Nauman has been in town this week. The American artist is remounting - listening, tweaking - two works that debuted at the 53d Venice Biennale, which closes Sunday. One of the pieces, Days, was in progress when the U.S. State Dept. chose Nauman and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to represent the U.S. at the Biennale. Then, in response to the honor, Nauman created an Italian-language counterpart, Giorni.

Both Days and Giorni are at the Art Museum through April, and anyone who cares about Nauman or music should hear them. It's helpful to commit to a long period of concentrated listening and thinking when you're in their presence. They reveal messages - and there are many of them - with time. Among other things, both works teach us to listen for poetry in the cacophony of daily life. Perhaps there's a certain Zen to be had in airports and big-box stores after all.

I'll have more about Venice and the two new works in Sunday's paper. My colleague Ed Sozanski gives Days and Giorni proper critical appraisal at a later date. The full show won the Biennale's top prize and accomplished quite a bit for the museum.

Nauman is a shy guy, even if his selective avoidance of the media only whets the appetite for writing about him and getting him to talk. My own experience with this sort of thing is that there's no point, journalistically speaking, in prying answers from an interview subject who doesn't want to be interviewed, and even less point to it on a human-consideration level. This week, when I sat down with Nauman, he clearly was in no mood to give much of himself.

He essentially said Venice was an enjoyable process and that he thought the way the museum installed his work was "really beautiful."

He praised Art Museum curator Carlos Basualdo, with whom he worked closely on selecting the 33 works in the show and who handled many of the logistics in Venice.

"Carlos always knew when it was time for espresso, and he always knew where to find really good gelato. That made the whole thing enjoyable."

Hard to argue with that.

If you didn't make it to Venice and would like to see what it was all about, you might want to get your hands on "Topological Gardens: Installation Views," a crisp and revealing pictorial record by photographer Michele Lamanna of the Nauman show in all three of its Venice venues. 

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