The Boston Globe for Thursday, March 17th ran a lengthy front-page article (with a "jump" to a page in Section A) about the toll that all the excitement of James Levine's first season as Music Director is taking on the players, especially the strings. Boston Globe articles go into paid archives pretty quickly, so it doesn't make sense to enter a click-through URL, but the story echoes articles I've read elsewhere in print and on the internet. The placement on page one with a continuation in the same section argues for how seriously the Globe's editors consider the issue, and I'm sure many readers were becoming acquainted with how difficult it is to perform lengthy and complicated works during a season, taking into account the Pops and Tanglewood, that essentially lasts all year. The timing wasn't accidental; the BSO presents a concert opera nearly every year, and this past weekend it was Wagner's "Die Fliegende Hollander" in its entirety through three performances, March 11th, 13th and 15th (the one I attended, and which ran from 8:05 pm through 11:00 pm). During a meeting with Maestro Levine that dealt with the increased workload including more rehearsal time, he agreed to some changes in programming; there will be one-less-piece in the program immediately following "DFH", and in the upcoming season, Robert Schumann's Fourth Symphony will replace his Second (the latter is not only a little longer, but contains passages of rapid-fire staccato violin parts). In a few weeks, the pages of the Globe will feature, um, "athletes" playing a game called baseball, while wearing red stockings (I don't know why). These gentlemen will spend most of a 3-hour game standing around waiting for a ball to be hit or pitched to them before they have to move a muscle... symphony players, not so lucky. "Laurence Glavin" <[log in to unmask]>