Performance Today®

Chad Lawson's latest release, The Chopin Variations, features Lawson's unique arrangements of music by Chopin, the poet of the piano.

It's like a game for composers: take a simple tune, then come up with as many twists on that tune as possible. It's called theme and variations, and composers have been having fun with it for centuries. On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll have fun with variations by Rachmaninoff, Bach, Bernstein, and Haydn.

Performance Today takes you to wherever great music is happening - even if it's happening in a hydro-electric power plant. On Tuesday's PT, we'll take you to the Heimbach Power Plant in Germany to hear a Mozart Divertimento. Plus, we'll go to Munich to hear Martin Spangenberg play Copland's Clarinet Concerto.

On Monday's Performance Today, we'll celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King with Joseph Schwantner's New Morning for the World, an orchestral piece that features a narrator reading words by Dr. King. Composer Joseph Schwantner will tell us how baseball star Willie Stargell became the first narrator of this now iconic piece.

On our Martin Luther King Day show, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Joseph Schwantner discusses New Morning For The World: 'Daybreak Of Freedom,' his tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Pianist Jonathan Biss loves playing for a concert audience. But playing by himself in a quiet, antiseptic studio while making a CD? Not so much. On this weekend's Performance Today, Jonathan Biss joins us to discuss the joys and travails of his 9-year Beethoven project.

Pianist Jonathan Biss loves playing for a concert audience. But playing by himself in a quiet, antiseptic studio while making a CD? Not so much. On Friday's Performance Today, Jonathan Biss joins us to discuss the joys and travails of his 9-year Beethoven project.

He was one of the most amazing child prodigies in history. Mahler and Strauss and Puccini were all huge fans. We're not talking about Mozart; we're talking about 20th century composer Erich Korngold. On Thursday's Performance Today, we'll hear his Piano Quintet from a concert in Charleston, South Carolina.

Tchaikovsky wrote his Variations on a Rococo Theme in homage to his favorite composer, Mozart. On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll hear American cellist Joshua Roman perform this blistering set of variations in concert with the Bellingham Festival Orchestra.