Reviving Beethoven & Co.

Anu Tali from Estonia conducted the closing concert for the 2006 Beethoven Festival with the kind of sincerity and raw energy that only comes from someone standing at the threshold of her career.

After all, college basketball is popular for the very same reason. Those boys love their game with heart and soul and want more than anything to make it big.

Conductor Anu Tali and violin soloist Maxim Vengerov, both under 35 years and with old-school training, are not there to preserve a half-dead musical tradition. They're recreating one that breathes new life into the classics instead of exchanging Beethoven and friends for the hip avant-garde.

"It's good to be different"

But new still means different -- at least in some ways.

"Perhaps it's even simpler being a woman because one if different," said the conductor, who is petit in stature with cropped blond hair. "And it's always good to be different."

Nevertheless, she downplays her femininity, taking up the baton Sunday evening in a tuxedo complete with tails and a cummerbund. But her well-earned reputation comes from her high musical standards, not from the novelty of being a female conductor.

At the age of 25, Tali founded the Estonian-Finnish Symphony Orchestra (now called the Nordic Symphony Orchestra) with her twin sister Kadri. Their goal? To promote cultural understanding between the two countries and cooperation between the world's leading young musicians.

The orchestra gives itself an innovative edge by thematicizing it program each year -- this season is all about "Legends."

NSO's audiences are young, said Tali, in an interview with the Beethoven Festival. "We in Estonia are trying to find a slightly different way to access the audience."

Self-supporting orchestras can survive

While in countries like Germany the arts are almost entirely funded by the state, the Tali twins have managed to finance their orchestra for the last eight years entirely with sponsorships and donations -- a precursor of European orchestras in the future.

Violinist Maxim Vengerov qualifies as a representative of classical music's up-and-coming, not only because he's not yet over the hill himself but also because he's personally committed to working with children.

After being named "ambassador for music" by UNICEF in 1997 -- the first classical musician to get the job -- he playing for abducted child-soldiers in Uganda, disadvantaged children in Harlem, child drug addicts in Thailand and kids on both sides of the Kosovan ethnic divide.

Being different is nothing new

Sunday's program appeared rather traditional -- at first glance. Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1, Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 2. For the 21st century, post-post-modern audience it's easy to forget that these guys were also rebels of sorts.

Prokofiev's First Symphony (1917), dubbed Symphonie classique, is a parody of the classical symphony. The young Russian composer, 26 years old at the time, monkeyed with traditional harmonies in some passages, toyed with the form and provoked chuckles from a audience that had lived through the October Russian Revolution just months before.

Beethoven's Second Symphony was written early in his musical development. His drastic musical innovations would come a bit later, but the background of the piece is humanly relevant to any generation.

The composer was "a great man entering a huge crisis but writing light-hearted, affirmative music -- and that while beginning to grow deaf!" said Anu Tali. "People have found memos of his that mention the possibility of suicide but never reached the public eye. Taken altogether, I find it adds up to a very powerful story."

Triple overtime for team Beethoven

Tali's conducting Sunday was youthful and energetic but so professional that it's easy to excuse the parts that may have been a bit too well choreographed, too pre-meditated. Just as for the seasoned center, the spontaneous slam-dunk comes with maturity and experience.

With their innovative tendencies, vigor and entrepreneurship, musicians like Anu Tali, Maxim Vengerov, and their budding colleagues around the world prove that classical music is alive and well -- and not just for its own sake. The music still has something to say and there are still a few talented individuals who will do anything to say it.