Performance Today®

Szymon Laks was a prisoner at Auschwitz, and leader of the prison orchestra. He says music did not offer comfort or peace, that music became a kind of torture, but he played on because his very life depended on it. The story and the music of Szymon Laks, on Saturday's Performance Today.

Trolls, goblins, and gnomes. On Friday's Performance Today, we'll join them all in the Hall of the Mountain King, when we hear Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite performed at the Artosphere Festival. Then, we'll head to New York to hear two special pieces: one old, one new...but both blue.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 4: It's delicate, but with an undercurrent of aggression. It looks back to the familiar, yet it's the very definition of avant garde. A symphony of glorious contradictions, from a concert just outside Washington D.C., on Thursday's Performance Today.

Szymon Laks was a prisoner at Auschwitz, and leader of the prison orchestra. He says music did not offer comfort or peace, that music became a kind of torture, but he played on because his very life depended on it. On Wednesday's Performance Today, the story and the music of Szymon Laks.

Composer and organist Rued Langgaard felt at odds with his Danish contemporaries... and he didn't keep it a secret. Langgaard was a prolific composer, but his dissonant personality separated him from the Danish musical establishment. His work wasn't truly recognized until after his death. Tune in for more about Rued Langgaard's life and music on Tuesday's Performance Today.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski was a dashing, virtuosic pianist around the turn of the 20th century. In 1919, he was the Prime Minister of Poland... his signature is on the Treaty of Versailles. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear Paderewski's Piano Concerto No. 1, from a concert in his hometown of Warsaw, Poland.

On Saturday's Performance Today, play along with this week's Piano Puzzler, and hear Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood play a sonata by Beethoven in concert at Spivey Hall in Morrow, Georgia.

Conductor Osmo Vanska says Jean Sibelius's 5th Symphony is the most positive and uplifting of all his symphonies. The symphony was composed and revised during the dark years of the First World War, but Sibelius had reason to feel optimistic, so very fortunate. The story behind Sibelius's 5th, and hear it in concert on Friday's 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 Thursday's Performance Today, Haywood trades candlesticks for stage lights... hear him and Joshua Bell together in concert at Spivey Hall in Morrow, Georgia.