Among the highlights of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra's next season will be the music of Brahms, Dvorak, Debussy and Rachmaninoff -- as well as excerpts from "West Side Story" and chestnuts from Viennese waltzmeister Johann Strauss Jr.

The 2009-2010 season, which the RSO is calling "Journeys," will also feature pops concerts with jazz crooner Aaron Neville on April 9 and songstress Natalie Cole on Nov. 5.

Cole had a kidney transplant last month and has battled other health problems, including hepatitis C. Music director David Stewart Wiley said the RSO has been in touch with Cole's management, however, and "she's going to be in good shape at the end of the summer. We have the expectation that she'll be with us."

The RSO's classics concerts will be divided between the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre at the civic center and Shaftman Performance Hall, with three programs in each space. Soloists will include Natasha Korsakova, whom Wiley described as a "Russian superstar" violinist, performing Brahms' "Violin Concerto in D Major" on Oct. 5., and young Armenian pianist Tavit Tashjian playing Sergei Rachmaninoff's dazzlingly difficult Piano Concerto No. 3 on Feb. 14 and 15. Clarinetist Jon Manasse will perform the Virginia premiere of Lowell Liebermann's "Clarinet Concerto" on Jan. 25. The RSO also will perform Mozart's "Requiem" and portions of Handel's "Messiah."

The season will be a "mix of the familiar and the new," Wiley said.

The striking brochure cover photo, by the way, is of RSO cellist Jeremiah Shaw, son of Audubon quartet cellist Tom Shaw.

RSO marketing director Rodney Overstreet, who took the photo, said he was striving for an old look that also conveyed the idea the RSO's next season will take its audience "on a meaningful journey."

He said he took the photograph of the train tracks from a crossing in the Glenvar area of Roanoke County.

Shaw was not actually there. His image was added using a computer program. "Photoshop is my friend," Overstreet explained.

For more information, call 343-9127 or visit rso.com.

Link to the future

Los Angeles photographer Eric Curry is a fan of famed steam train photographer O. Winston Link -- and it shows.

Curry's elaborately staged and lighted nighttime photographs are featured in "American Pride and Passion," on view at the O. Winston Link Museum through July 21.

Link, who died in 2001, shot many nighttime images of steam trains on the Norfolk and Western Railway in the late 1950s.

Curry, too, obviously loves the dark, and the possibilities it presents for selectively highlighting elements of a picture with artificial lighting.

But Curry works in color, as Link almost never did at night. The impact, for one accustomed to Link's black-and-white images, is vivid and a little surprising -- like seeing fireworks burst in the Fourth of July sky.

"I like how it fits in with the permanent collection, as far as the method," said museum marketing coordinator Allie Hasson of Curry's work.

In another apparent nod to Link, Curry's photography focuses on modes of transportation: There are vintage aircraft, old cars, monster trucks, a submarine -- and, of course, trains.

On his Web site, Curry describes "American Pride and Passion" as "my attempt to draw out the beauty and passion from everyday objects that come alive during my controlled lighting at night. ... I'm striving to interpret them as metaphors for values of character, honor, integrity and pride."

For more information, call 982-5465 or visit linkmuseum.org.

Money for murals

The Arts Council of the Blue Ridge has received $5,000 from Bank of America to develop Roanoke Youth Arts Connections, a joint program involving local artists, the Roanoke Police Department and area youth.

Young artists will create community murals with help from professional artists Ed Dolinger, Polly Branch, Katherine Devine and Steve Owens. Murals will be placed on the interior wall of Center in the Square's parking garage on Campbell Avenue and used as temporary displays at the City Market Building.

Roanoke Youth Arts Connections is modeled after a similar program in Reno, Nev., said Laura Rawlings, executive director of the Arts Council of the Blue Ridge.

For more information, contact Rhonda Hale at 224-1205 or e-mail rhale@theartscouncil.org.

The "Arts & Culture" column runs weekly in Sunday's Extra.