Performance Today®

The Performance Today tour of the Danube River is currently underway; Fred Child and PT listeners are off exploring musical landmarks. This weekend, we'll follow their path -- musically -- with a quintet written by Mozart while he lived in Salzburg. Plus, Bruce Adolphe has this week's Piano Puzzler.

While Fred is away in Vienna, we've decided to take a musical trip there too. On Friday's Performance Today, we'll hear Franz von Suppe's Light Cavalry Overture; music about a wealthy Austrian baron, his love affair with a Hungarian countess, and the antics of her court, the "light" cavalry.

On Thursday's Performance Today, we have concert highlights large and small. We'll head to Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic play big music by Anton Bruckner. And we'll go to Chattanooga, Tennessee for a set of smaller preludes -- music for clarinet and piano by Alexander Scriabin.

Each week on our Piano Puzzler, composer Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer. We then get one of our listeners on the phone to try to guess the tune and the composer whose style Bruce is imitating. Play along with our Piano Puzzler, on Wednesday's Performance Today.

For the rest of this week, Fred Child will be leading some PT listeners on a tour of Central Europe; Valerie Kahler will host while he's away. On Tuesday's Performance Today, we'll mark the first stop of PT's tour in Prague with music by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana.

Aaron Copland was from Brooklyn. He was a city slicker who captured -- and to a certain degree, created -- what we think of as the sound of the old American West. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear selections from his cowboy ballet, "Billy the Kid."

All summer long, we're featuring great American music inspired by great American places as part of our PT Summer Road Trip. This weekend, we'll head to Appalachia to hear mountain music by a Jen Kruger, a Swiss composer who lives in North Carolina.

All summer long, we're featuring great American music inspired by great American places. On Friday, the next stop on our PT Summer Road Trip is Appalachia, where we'll hear mountain music by a Jen Kruger, a Swiss composer who lives in North Carolina.

What happens when you take an evocative piece for full orchestra and subtract the entire string section? The music is very much the same --- but altogether different. On Thursday's Performance Today, we'll hear the US Marine Band play a string-less arrangement of Maurice Ravel's Spanish Rhapsody.