Listening to great music in a great space should be as much a part of The Resistance as a protest march or “No Kings” demonstration. It revives hope during the nation’s distress. It restores the soul for the fight, and it reminds us what the fight is for — truth, beauty, freedom.
These thoughts came last week as I stepped away from the dreary news about the American presidency to listen to an excellent oboist, Katherine Needleman, perform a Mozart concerto with an orchestra of young people in the wonderful main hall of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.
There was a lot going on, so allow me to set the scene.
The Pratt’s main hall, one of the great public spaces on the East Coast, had been transformed into something like a basketball court as the library celebrates the stellar NBA career of a native son, Carmelo Anthony. Through December, the Pratt is the “House of Melo,” with smartly-designed displays chronicling Anthony’s climb from Murphy Homes and the Mount Royal Rec Center to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Into this grand space came Amit Peled with the young musicians of the Mount Vernon Virtuosi (MVV) to perform a free “Mozart in Jeans” concert at midday. It might have been “Mozart in Jeans and Ts” as all the musicians sported red MVV T-shirts.
Peled, an acclaimed cellist, teaches at the Peabody Institute a few blocks away. Over the last several years he developed the MVV chamber orchestra to provide his talented students — and the community — with a schedule of free, quality concerts.
More than that, Peled’s aim is to encourage young musicians to stay in Baltimore and expand the city’s culture of classical music by reaching new and marginalized communities.
“I’ve been here now for 21 years,” he said when we first spoke about the project in 2024. “After a few years of creating really fantastic cellists from all over the world, I realized that we nourish them, they come here, they study and then they get out. They don’t want to stay. That bothered me.”
So Peled established Mount Vernon Virtuosi in 2018 and sought the support of donors.
The group’s latest concert was a one-hour program of Mozart: two divertimenti and the concerto for oboe and orchestra featuring Katherine Needleman.
She has for years held the seat of principal oboe with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, but here she was, in MVV T-shirt and jeans, performing a concerto she has played, taught and heard in preparation for auditions countless times.
Of course, it was the first time for many of us in the audience, seated in the hall transformed to the Melo court, and the sound that came from Needleman’s oboe soared into the great space — music written in 1777 still robust, still magical in 2025.
That Needleman performed without sheet music was not unusual; soloists do it all the time. And Needleman calls the Mozart concerto “one of his most simple, straightforward and easy-going ones.”
Still, I find it astonishing that all those notes from Wolfgang’s hand — “Too many notes,” says the opera director to the emperor in Amadeus — managed to perfectly reach Needleman’s fingers.
What a gift it was to hear her play.
The oboe concerto includes cadenzas — that is, places where the oboist gets to perform a solo, sometimes improvised, sometimes composed. Nothing new there, except something unusual happened.
In anticipation of each cadenza, Needleman left her position at the front of the orchestra and went to the rear to perform — not solo, but together with the MVV oboists, then at another point with the horns, then at another with a cellist.
It was a rare treat to see her do this.
After the concert, I asked Needlemen to explain what it was all about.
“I haven’t played this piece in public for 10 years,” she said. “I have always, as everyone else does, stood there and played a cadenza of 45 to 75 seconds long, standing where one should. But the idea was one I could not embrace this time.
“So I wrote cadenzas to play with others — the oboe section, the horn section, and the principal cellist. … Thankfully, Amit and these young players were game for this idea. It was really fun and made me look forward to the cadenzas in a way I never have before.
“There’s something about 45 to 75 seconds of solo pyrotechnics at the front of the stage that didn’t feel right to me right now. … So I came up with this idea to include others.”
Peled, who conducted the concert, praised Needleman for the initiative to try something different. It’s hard to imagine that Mozart would have objected.
“Katherine is truly amazing,” Peled said. “She wanted to involve more of the ensemble. . . . Her choice to walk [to the rear of the orchestra] each time felt like a beautiful gesture of community, equality and mutual support, and we felt truly honored by it.”
I felt inspired by it. The concert did not get my mind off the news from Washington completely; that’s pretty much impossible these days. But beautiful music in a beautiful space — if you can find it, go for it, especially with the holidays upon us. It revives hope. It restores the soul.
Click here to listen to an excerpt of the Mozart Oboe Concerto.
Dan Rodricks, former columnist for The Baltimore Sun, now writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks.com
