Brown's 20-year concerto quest culminates this week when he and the orchestra present the premiere of the Dan Welcher Timpani Concerto.

"I wasn't excited about anything I saw or heard," Brown said of the extant timpani literature early in his career. "Other timpanists had the same gripes." So he set out to find someone to write "something people would want to play." After several years of listening to new works by various composers, he realized he had been measuring all of them against the music of Welcher, from whom he once took a theory class at the University of Louisville. Welcher's track record of successful concertos for other instruments, his affinity for percussion and percussionists (though he was a bassoonist in his performing days) and "the fact that audiences and orchestra players tend to really enjoy his work" made him the right composer for the job, Brown said.

The concerto is in three movements, about 17 minutes total. "My idea was to use the timpani in its three hats," Welcher said in an interview from his office at the University of Texas at Austin. The drums traditionally are used in military, funereal and dance settings, so the movements are titled "Marching," "Mourning" and "Dancing."

"Each has a different character and scoring," Welcher said. The first features mostly woodwinds and brass, the second all strings. The third is a series of dance variations, including a hoedown, a Celtic jig and Afro-Cuban jazz; each variation calls for the soloist to use a different kind of stick, such as maraca sticks and nylon brushes. "There are lots of little things to give it flavor, so it's more than 20 minutes of indiscriminate banging," the composer said.

Utah Symphony music director Keith Lockhart, who will conduct the concerts, is excited at the prospect. "It looks to me like a concerto a lot of other people will want to play - and we've got it first," he said.

"I'm actually able to sing through the instrument," Brown said, picking up the sticks and demonstrating that indeed, the concerto is highly melodic, even danceable.

Timpani technology over the past century has allowed the instrument to execute a melody as never before, he noted. Up to the late 19th century, timpanists had to adjust screws manually to change pitch - almost always between movements of a symphony or concerto. Now the drums have pedals, and "some of our parts are almost as chromatic as a contrabassoon or tuba," Brown said. He will play six timpani in this concerto and said there are moments when "my feet are flying as fast as my hands."

Growing up in Kentucky, Brown tried clarinet, piano, trumpet and singing; none except singing held his interest long. He started drum lessons in ninth grade and quickly gravitated to the timpani. Reasoning that "as a musician, I'd probably starve," he entered college as a liberal-arts major with an eye toward law school.

"Halfway through my second year, I realized I was living a lie," he said. "To be anything else but a percussionist, a timpanist, was not being true to myself. It was something I was impelled toward from within."

Brown performed in several service bands, including the multiservice Bicentennial Band, and at the Colorado Springs Symphony before joining the Utah Symphony in 1987. Now, "being a husband, father [of two teenagers], player and teacher and working around my home pretty much fills up my day," he said.

"It's been a good career and still is," said Brown, whose enjoyment is readily evident when he plays. It's no act, he said; "I've just always sincerely and naturally loved playing the timpani."

Tugging at heartstrings

Leonard Braus has the best job in the world. Just ask him.

"The violin is the greatest instrument," said Braus, one of the Utah Symphony's two associate concertmasters. "Next to the human voice, it's the finest; the most can be done with it. To me, it's still the king of instruments. When there's an important or really sad scene in a movie, they use the violin. It tugs at people's emotions."

Braus predicts the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2, which he performs with the orchestra this week, will tug at listeners' emotions, too.

"It's from Prokofiev's best period, his Romantic era, when he wrote 'Romeo and Juliet' and all those favorite places of his," he said. "It's a Romantic piece, yet it has a modern aspect; I stress the Romantic.

"Prokofiev was a great lyricist. The concerto starts with an unaccompanied, lyrical, beautiful tune. . . . The first and second movements are unabashedly lyrical; the third has that steeliness we associate with Prokofiev, but it's still very lyrical."

"It's one of the most engaging and melodic concertos in the 20th-century repertoire," said Lockhart, who will conduct the concerts. "Lenny has an extremely Romantic sort of playing, a big sound - the kind of sound and approach one would think perfect for late-Romantic 20th-century compositions."

Braus, a native of Cincinnati, started playing the violin at age 9. That's pretty late by today's standards, but he caught up quickly enough - he played a Vivaldi concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony a year and a half later, at age 11. At that age, he noted, "You don't know it's difficult. You find that out later."

He had played the clarinet for three weeks, but quit on his dentist's advice because his teeth were crooked. He didn't care for the instrument much anyway, he confessed. "Having to clean out saliva was not for me."

Braus played a few more times with the Cincinnati Symphony before heading for the music school at Indiana University, where his primary teacher was the eminent violinist Josef Gingold. He also studied with Tadeusz Wronski and Ivan Galamian. He was a semifinalist at the 1976 Paganini International Violin Competition and spent three seasons as concertmaster of the Tulsa Philharmonic before joining the Utah Symphony.

"It's a great orchestra," he said of his current job. "The people are wonderful and play at a very high level. People always give their best; all my colleagues do."

O'Keeffe for eyes and ears

The Utah Symphony has Georgia on its mind this week. The orchestra will perform Dan Welcher's "Prairie Light: Three Texas Watercolors by Georgia O'Keeffe," accompanied by a video essay inspired by the same paintings.

The 1986 composition has three movements, played without pause: "Light Coming on the Plains," "Canyon With Crows" and "Starlight Night." Each is based on one of a series of watercolors O'Keeffe painted in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, in 1917, when the then-19-year-old artist was teaching in the nearby town of Canyon. "In 15 minutes, it describes 24 hours from the same vantage point," Welcher said.

Salt Lake filmmaker Jan Andrews created the video presentation in a joint venture with the Salt Lake Arts Center. It uses footage she filmed in Palo Duro Canyon, "trying to think as a painter," she said. "I began to film things as if I were her. . . . I didn't do any panning shots. There are two short shots that are like a head turning. The rest are still images."

Andrews said she isn't sure she found the exact spot where O'Keeffe painted, but is pleased with how well the video montage evokes the spirit of the watercolors. "[O'Keeffe] pinned two crows in the sky [in the second painting]; I have one hawk," she said. "It didn't mater that it was not replicated exactly. . . . I wanted a dreamscape."

The images will be projected on curtains that stretch across the wall behind the orchestra. The curtains add a "misty layer" that appeals to Andrews.

Andrews, who has had work shown at Sundance and other film festivals, is working with Gary Vlasic on another multimedia presentation for the Utah Symphony, Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire," to be performed in January.

"Prairie Light" has "such obvious, strong visual imagery attached to it," said Lockhart, who has conducted the work several times. "The piece cries out for a visual component."

Extra sensory symphony

The Utah Symphony, violinist Leonard Braus, timpanist George Brown and conductor Keith Lockhart will perform Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Browning Center at Weber State University, Ogden, where tickets are $9 to $29; and Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. in Abravanel Hall, 123 W. South Temple, Salt Lake City, where tickets are $12 to $47.