Major music

Southern Living, Nov 1999 by Thomas, Les

The lights dim, the conductor raises his baton, and for a moment the audience in Baltimore's Friedberg Hall freezes like a baseball crowd watching two outs, two strikes, and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th.

In a city that worships baseball, Friedberg Hall is the Camden Yards of classical music. Since 1866, it has been the home field for The Peabody Conservatory of Music, a school with a playing streak that even Cal Ripken could envy. For well over a century, it has coached some of the world's most promising students on their way to careers in the major leagues of music.

Most made their debuts on the stage at the revered 700-seat concert hall. Many of Peabody's students are featured in the orchestras, chamber groups, and operatic performances of this concert season that includes more than 70 public performances, from September through May.

"When you come to the Peabody concerts, you may be listening to a student who will win a major prize or go on to a concert solo career," says institute spokesperson Anne Garside. Students in the past have won many of the world's major prizes, ranging from the Van Cliburn competition in Texas to the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow.

Musicians come from all over the world for the opportunity to study with such acclaimed teachers as guitarist Manuel Barrueco and pianist Leon Fleisher. About a third of the 630 students are from foreign countries.

The Peabody's highly touted opera theater program, which is performing Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress November 11 to 14, has former students singing with the Metropolitan Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, and other acclaimed opera companies.

Other concert performances set for this winter range from computer music presented by the institute's groundbreaking Computer Music Consort to the jazzy sounds of the newly formed Peabody Big Band. Organ recitals and chamber music concerts are usually performed in Griswold Hall, a room that's graced with a magnificent, golden-- threaded, 16th-century Flemish tapestry given to the institute by William Randolph Hearst. The setting is very similar to one of the royal salons where much of the music played here was originally performed.

Tonight, the rhapsody of a Beethoven symphony fills Friedberg Hall. When the music ends, the audience responds with the kind of thunderous response Baltimore fans usually reserve for a grandslam home run. Les Thomas