Performance Today®

On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll hear a great American band play a great American symphony. Plus Bruce Adolphe joins us for this week's Piano Puzzler.

On Tuesday's Performance Today, pianist Inon Barnatan joins Fred Child at Steinway Hall in New York. They'll talk about the art of using the middle pedal on the piano, and Barnatan will play a flighty piece by Felix Mendelssohn.

When he was young, Nikolaus Harnoncourt played the cello. But he often found himself questioning why the music was performed a certain way. Since he always had his own opinion, Harnoncourt decided to become a conductor. On Monday's Performance Today we'll hear him conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Mozart's Symphony No. 40.

On this weekend's Performance Today, we'll go to a concert in Cardiff, Wales, to hear a rarely-played American gem: the jazzy Symphony No. 2 by composer Randall Thompson. Plus composer Bruce Adolphe joins us with this week's musical game, our Piano Puzzler.

On Friday's Performance Today we're celebrating Valentine's Day with music and love. We'll hear a pianist in concert last month making a public declaration of love, and a quartet by Robert Schumann featuring a private, secret code of love.

Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt join host Fred Child in the studio to discuss their musical collaboration and to perform several songs from their album Night.

Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin believes that the Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich is both a cry and a confession; it is music that has always spoken to the most intimate part of his soul. On Thursday's Performance Today, we'll hear Nezet-Seguin lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in a concert performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 at Carnegie Hall.

On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll go to a concert in Cardiff, Wales, to hear a rarely-played American gem: the jazzy Symphony No. 2 by composer Randall Thompson. Plus composer Bruce Adolphe joins us with this week's musical game, our Piano Puzzler.

When he was 17 years old, pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk was in a terrible car accident: part of his skull was crushed and he was in a coma. Now he's fully recovered and back on the concert scene, and on Tuesday's Performance Today we'll hear from a recent concert he gave in Fort Lauderdale.