With any luck, the 2010 Gilmore Young Artist won’t have to pack a stethoscope anytime soon. With his career still in its rosy dawn, Albright has combined dexterity, depth and dramatic insight to forge a strong, original style.

While Lindemann has yoked his power as drain commissioner to a passionate crusade for low-impact development and cleaner water, Grebner wants to pull the plug and drain the drama from the office.

“The Great Lakes basin has 20 percent of the available water in the whole world,” Lindemann said. “This is a major responsibility.” He blinked, as if distracted from a telescope trained on the Andromeda galaxy by a rat scurrying across the observatory. “You can’t get here and try to manage that through name-calling, innuendoes, threats and all the other crap that a lot of politicians like to pull, including Grebner.”

Passersby curious enough to look into the crates saw hundreds of bundled black-and-white photographs, all portraits of people who met violent death under repressive Latin American regimes. Within 15 minutes, the van was gone. A woman wearing a blood-red scarf sat quietly among the crates, sewing squares of fabric over the faces in the photographs.

A double shot of piano concertos featuring piano god Ralph Votapek, the mighty rumble of Shostakovich Tenth Symphony, big choral works from Brahms and Monteverdi, the return of pianist Christopher O’Riley and a generous salvo of lesser-known music promises to make the 2012-2013 Lansing Symphony season a ride and a half.

All three drooled at the prospect of lending a hand Oct. 6 to the Shostakovich epic, one of the 20th century’s great musical canvases. “Every time you turn the page, it’s exciting,” Kroth said. “The slow movement is just poetry, with the flute, oboe and bassoon. It’s so beautiful.”

By all indicators, from artistic to economic, the symphony has successfully made the transition from classical music’s marble-pedestal past to a new age of accessibility and budget consciousness.

The final Lansing Symphony chamber concert of the season gave delicate notice that the symphony isn’t all about blasting brass, soaring strings and booming tympani.

He could have pushed a mailbag or worked on an assembly line all those years, and nearly did. Instead, he combined the daily-grind work ethic of his Detroit roots with the knightly passion of the Watergateera journalism he absorbed in the early 1970s..

There hasn’t been a player-manager in baseball since Pete Rose in the 1980s, but the breed is far from extinct. Classical violinist Joshua Bell, already destined for the Fiddle Hall of Fame, will both solo with and conduct the fabled Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in a meaty all-Beethoven program at the Wharton Center Saturday.