Performance Today®

Emmanuel Pahud is one of the greatest flute players on the planet. He is Principal Flute of the Berlin Philharmonic, and he also has an extensive solo career. On Thursday's Performance Today, take a seat at the Lugano Festival in Switzerland, and hear Emmanuel Pahud in concert with the Swiss Italian Orchestra.

The concert was an experiment - a new composition was played, and the audience was supposed to guess who wrote it. When the music ended, Maurice Ravel's friend leaned over said: "What idiot could have written such a piece?" Well, that "idiot" would be Ravel, and the music is eternal. Ravel's 'Valses nobles et sentimentales', on Wednesday's Performance Today.

Samuil Feinberg was a Russian pianist and composer. He had a fine career as a pianist inside the USSR, but he was almost never allowed to leave the country... so Feinberg's work isn't as well known to the rest of the world. Pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin would like to change that. On Tuesday's Performance Today, tune in to hear Hamelin play Samuil Feinberg's Piano Sonata No. 1, from the Aspen Music Festival.

The Grand Teton Music Festival, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is an annual celebration of music in a stunning mountain location. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear music and conversation from a special PT event at the 2017 festival, beginning with the Piano Trio No. 1, by Felix Mendelssohn.

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.