The moment David Zinman leaves Baltimore, it seems, he gets famous -- profiting from his years here while making us look bad for losing him.

Just kidding, folks, just kidding.

Actually, anything that's good for David Zinman reflects favorably on the Baltimore Symphony and vice versa.

Nevertheless, it seems that there's been more mention made of Zinman in the international music press in the last few days than in all 13 years of his tenure as our orchestra's music director.

In the Arts and Leisure section of Sunday's New York Times, for example, music critic Greg Sandow, in his "Looking for Listeners Who Can Love New Music," mentions Zinman's "enthusiastically played" performances of "a lot of contemporary work" and calls the BSO, along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, the "three major American orchestras that play the most new music."

Sandow means that as a compliment, and he's not an easy man to please.

After all, he's the guy who, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, recently trashed the Boston Symphony and its music director, Seiji Ozawa.

And in the pages of the March issue of Gramophone, the world's most widely read and influential classical-music magazine, Zinman's recently issued recording with violinist Hilary Hahn and the BSO of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the Bernstein "Serenade" on Sony Classical was named "Record of the Month." When one considers that hundreds of new classical records are issued each month, just by the major labels alone, that's a remarkable honor.

Too bad it didn't happen when Zinman was still in residence.

And remember those nutty performances of Beethoven's nine symphonies that Zinman used to give -- the anti-romantic ones with those dry textures and those tempos as fast as the rush for the rest rooms at the Met at intermission?

Zinman wanted to record those symphonies here in Baltimore. But a deal with Japan's Denon label fell through because American orchestras are so expensive to record -- around $200,000 a pop for a work without soloists and chorus -- and the BSO's management couldn't come up with the needed bucks.

Well, Zinman's now music director of the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra in Switzerland -- where everything's more expensive than in the United States except for recording costs.

At about $60,000 per symphony, Zinman has now recorded Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 with the Tonhalle for the super-budget Pro Arte label, which sells CDs for approximately $5.

But Zinman's Zurich interpretations -- which were worked out and perfected in Baltimore -- have been getting a ton of press, most of it good.

While a few critics have hated Zinman's recordings, most have loved them, comparing his performances favorably to the much more expensively priced interpretations of Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner, Nicholas Harnoncourt and Christopher Hogwood.

Zinman felt that his work with the orchestra was never sufficiently appreciated here -- and he was probably right.

For him, Baltimore may not have been a great place to live. But in his case, it seems to have been a terrific place to leave.

Pub Date: 3/02/99