Performance Today®

American composer William Bolcolm teaches at the University of Michigan where, on Saturdays in the fall, the town is abuzz for Wolverine football. On today's show, hear the world premiere of Bolcom's "Ann Arbor Saturday."

When Aaron Diehl was a kid, he took piano lessons and had a love for pipe organ music. By the time he was a teenager, he'd been bitten by the jazz bug. These days, he can be found playing a piano concerto with an orchestra...or at a jazz club with his trio. On today's show, Aaron Diehl plays from "Etudes for Jazz Piano" by Dick Hyman.

Listen to violinist Joshua Bell, his mother Shirley and his son Josef read the children's book "Dance of the Violin." The book is inspired by a music competition that Bell participated in as a kid which started as a disaster, but ended as the best day ever.

Composer Pierre Jalbert recently wrote a piece as a response to Beethoven's Symphony No. 4. But if listeners don't pick up on that connection, that's alright by Jalbert. He's more focused on other goals. On today's show, hear the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's world premiere performance of the Passage, by Pierre Jalbert.

Grab your dancing shoes and dust off your spacesuit. On today's show, we're going on a musical "Trip to the Moon" with composer Jacques Offenbach and the group WindSync.

Composer Behzad Ranjbaran says of all the instruments in the orchestra, the viola is the voice of wisdom, moderation, and prudence. And it has flair and brilliance as well. On today's show, we'll hear a concerto Ranjbaran wrote for the musical voice of wisdom, from a concert with the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra.

Grab your dancing shoes and dust off your spacesuit. On today's show, we're going on a musical "Trip to the Moon" with composer Jacques Offenbach and the group WindSync.

In 1953, Florence Price wrote some dances for piano. She died unexpectedly shortly after that. One of her old friends turned her piano dances into a set of works for orchestra. On today's show, hear the world premiere of Dances in the Canebrakes, by Florence Price, orchestrated by William Grant Still.

Ever played that game using the letters of musical notes to spell words? Composer Belinda Reynolds used that idea when she wrote a piece for piano and two marimbas. On today's show, it's a musical spelling game: hear "Play," by Belinda Reynolds.