Performance Today®

Benjamin Beilman plays a special violin, a Stradivarius, hand-crafted in 1709. He has the violin on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation, so eventually he'll have to give the violin back. On this weekend's show, Benjamin Beilman describes what it feels like to know that their time together is temporary; then hear him play a sonata by Eugene Ysaye, from a concert at the Music@Menlo Festival.

Gabriel Campos Zamora grew up with parents who played jazz, and now he is the principal clarinetist for the Minnesota Orchestra. Gabriel Campos Zamora gets the best of both worlds when he busts out some boogie-woogie with an orchestra backing him up; a toe-tapping Concerto by Artie Shaw, on this episode of Performance Today.

Picture Death playing his malevolent fiddle in the graveyard on Halloween night. The skeletons rise and do their annual clattering dance until the sun comes up next morning. It's Halloween...get into the spirit with the Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens.

At only 11 years old, cellist Jivan Ramesh is already a jack-of-all-trades.

Every week on our Piano Puzzler, composer Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer. On today's show, play along on; see if you can guess the tune and the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking.

In the classical music of North India, there are moments when singers really cut loose and show their vocal virtuosity. It's called a "tarana." Composer Reena Esmail has brought that idea and sound into a Western ensemble. Hear Tuttarana, by Reena Esmail, on this episode of Performance Today

When Sam Haywood was four years, old his parents got a rickety old piano, with built-in candlestick holders. He would only play when the candles were lit. On today's show, Haywood trades candlesticks for stage-lights...hear him and Joshua Bell together in concert at Spivey Hall in Morrow, Georgia.

When Claude Debussy wrote music for the ballet "Jeux," he was picturing a game of tennis between two women and one young man. In tennis, "love" means nothing; in Debussy's music, love is everything. On today's episode, we'll hear romance and seduction on the courts, from a concert by the New York Philharmonic.

The trombone players in the Buffalo Philharmonic asked composer Eric Ewazen if he would write something especially for them. Ewazen loved the idea and came up with his Triple Concerto for Three Trombones and Orchestra. On today's show, we take you to Buffalo to hear it in concert.