Music Notes by Mark Jordan Youth Symphony Sent Packing Its Bags As it prepares to embark on its second European summer tour, the Memphis Youth Symphony, in conjunction with the Memphis Area Youth Wind Ensemble and the University of Memphis music department, is staging an ambitious and unique concert this Sunday afternoon at the Germantown Performing Arts Center. The youth symphony has been invited by Music Celebration International to participate in a summer tour that will take the group's 82 members, ages 11 to 18, to Vienna, Innsbrück, Graz, Salzburg, and Budapest. To help raise money for the trip, the youth symphony is staging Collage 2000, a concert the puts a lot of classical favorites into a new light. Collage 2000 features the youth symphony and a variety of guest performers from the University of Memphis. The concert will be made up of 23 separate pieces -- Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings, Richard Strauss' intro to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and John Williams' cantina from Star Wars (hey, they're still kids) among them -- with each piece running two to three minutes. All the performers will be on stage for the entire concert with a spotlight highlighting the featured performers of a given piece. The pieces have been carefully chosen and arranged so that they flow into each other, creating the desired collage effect. For this reason, organizers are asking the audience to hold their applause until the end. According to organizers, the collage concert format has been a popular format for years at the famed Interlochen Arts Academy. Collage 2000 starts Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students with all proceeds going toward the youth symphony's summer tour. For tickets and more information call 757-7256. New Stuff in the Bins You may remember a band called Bicycle Thief that was playing around town about a year ago. If you're wondering where they went, the answer is: Baltimore. Guitarist/singer/songwriter Dale Naron and company have taken their dark, somnabulisitic country rock to the city of Poe where they now play under the name (fittingly) The Great Depression. This Monday, however, they'll be swinging back through town for a show at the Map Room with kindred mellow spirits Lucero. They'll be bringing with them a new CD, Here's To Your Destruction, that sounds like a collaboration between the Cowboy Junkies and the Velvet Underground (more so than the former's "Sweet Jane" cover). Lyrically, its pretty standard stuff -- loneliness, woman troubles, drinking --but Naron has a fine feel for atmospherics and writes songs that seep into your head like a opium-shrouded dream. This stuff ordinarily doesn't play well live, but the cramp and dark Map Room may prove me wrong. In the meantime, just in time for spring showers, Here's To Your Destruction makes one helluva rainy day soundtrack. Brave Combo The Process (Rounder) Cat Power The Covers Record (Matador) Deborah Coleman Soft Place to Land (Blind Pig) Tinsley Ellis Kingpin (Capricorn) Finjan Dancing on Water (Rounder) Fishbone & the Familyhood Nextperience Presents: The Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx (Hollywood) The Reverend Horton Heat Spend a Night in the Box (Time Bomb) Janis Ian God and the F.B.I. (Windham Hill) Ice Cube War & Peace Vol. 2: The Peace Disc (Priority) Eric Idle Sings Monty Python (Restless) The Nields If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now (Rounder) Pantera Reinventing the Steel (Elektra) Patti Smith Gung Ho (Arista) Ween White Pepper (Elektra)