A musical dervish sets down at the Blossom Festival

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 30, 2000

Think you'd like to be a jet-setting symphony orchestra conductor? Here's Florida Orchestra music director Jahja Ling describing his recent itinerary, speaking from his sister's house in New Jersey on Monday morning:

"I'm leaving for Rochester today to speak at a music camp. I was with the Cleveland Orchestra on tour to Vienna and Cologne, then I went to Paris, then to Taipei to conduct the last concert of the season there, then to Hawaii for a few days. Four weeks I've been away."

Ling's round-the-world travels come about from holding positions with three orchestras. Along with his Tampa Bay post, he's also music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan and resident conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra.

This weekend he's in Ohio to launch the first season of his fourth job as director of the Blossom Festival, summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra. He'll conduct a new work by Augusta Read Thomas, . . . Song in Sorrow . . ., commissioned to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War protest shootings at Kent State University, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Florida Orchestra concertgoers will recognize some of this summer's programming at Blossom, an outdoor amphitheater in the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area north of Akron. The orchestra will play Holst's The Planets accompanied by big-screen footage from space by NASA, and one of the soloists is pianist Lang Lang. Both The Planets/NASA pairing and Lang were big hits this past season in Tampa Bay.

Ling, who succeeded Leonard Slatkin as director, will lead eight of the programs this summer. In the past, concerts he has conducted there have drawn crowds as large as 12,000. He hopes to attract more young people to Blossom.

"Because it's a casual setting, it's a good place to expose the audience of the future to classical music," he said. "Some of the concerts will appeal to young people. There's The Planets with the NASA video. An American program with Appalachian Spring and Grand Canyon Suite. Young soloists like Lang and Alisa Weilerstein, a 16-year-old cellist. Gil Shaham and Jian Wang in the Brahms Double Concerto. I commissioned James Horner, composer of the Titanic score, to write a fanfare."

Blossom runs through Sept. 3. Other highlights include a performance of Verdi's Requiem, a Bach "marathon" in which the complete Brandenburg Concertos plus other works will be played in a four-hour concert and a program featuring Broadway star Audra McDonald.

Ling, a devout Christian, will spend part of the summer conducting for the Stephen Tong Evangelistic Ministries, led by his friend, who is known as the Billy Graham of Asia. He'll conduct for Tong crusades in New York, New Orleans and Indianapolis.

For Blossom information: (800) 686-1141; www.clevelandorchestra.com.

THEATER -- If you think the Festival of States parade, The Pier and the old Florida Theater are the stuff of musical comedy, then Webb's City: the Musical is the show for you. Steve Wilkerson gives an uncanny performance as Doc Webb, the retailing innovator whose roadside attraction put St. Petersburg on the map, in the Lee Ahlin/Bill Leavengood musical. Performances are at 7:30 tonight, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Mahaffey Theater. Tickets are $12.50 and $17.50. Call (727) 892-5767. Former American Stage artistic director Victoria Holloway stages Far East by A.R. Gurney at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota. The play, a recent off-Broadway hit about a U.S. Navy officer who falls in love with a Japanese woman while stationed in Tokyo in the 1950s, opens Tuesday and continues through July 22. Tickets are $18 to $26. Call (941) 366-9000.

PEOPLE -- The Tampa Bay Composers' Forum has been a steady supporter of Daniel Kellogg, one of nine young composers to win prestigious BMI Student Composer Awards this year. Kellogg, 24, a graduate student at Yale, has been recognized twice by the forum. In April, his quintet Whitening Fury won first prize in the group's Festival of Living Music.