Performance Today®

The winter solstice is almost upon us. In anticipation of the longest night of the year we're featuring music for and of the night on Friday's Performance Today, including music by American composer Morten Lauridsen.

Conductor Simon Rattle has known The Nutcracker since he was a kid, and with each passing year he becomes more fascinated with the music. Coming up on Thursday's Performance Today, Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in The Nutcracker "B-sides;" the sometimes overlooked, but still heart-tugging and toe-tapping dances from the rest of Tchaikovsky's beloved ballet.

Hakan Hardenberger's father was always late getting Christmas presents. One year - on the day before Christmas - he came across a music shop. In that shop he saw a trumpet, which he decided to buy for his 8-year-old son. Thanks to that last-minute present, young Hakan grew up to be one of the great trumpet soloists of our time. On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll hear Hakan Hardenberger perform Jean Francaix's Sonatine for Trumpet and Piano.

When the great German composer Richard Strauss was a baby, he cried when he heard the violin and smiled when he heard the French horn. (At least, according to his mother.) Maybe he reacted that way because his father was a horn player. On Tuesday's Performance Today we'll hear Richard Strauss' Horn Concerto No. 1, which he wrote at age 18 as a 60th birthday present for his father.

Pianist Menachem Pressler was born on Dec. 16, 1923, which makes today his 90th birthday. Pressler is still as busy as ever, giving concerts around the world and teaching piano. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear him play a couple of heartfelt Intermezzos by Johannes Brahms, from a concert at the Music@Menlo Festival. And Pressler will discuss how music nourishes and sustains him; from his boyhood years in Germany to his 90th birthday and beyond.

In the spring of 2002 we went on the air with composer Bruce Adolphe with what we called a Keyboard Conundrum; he had taken a folk tune and re-written it in the style of a great classical composer. The very next week we called it the Piano Puzzler, and Bruce has been sharing these fun and entertainingly educational pieces on PT every week since. Coming up on this weekend's Performance Today, we'll hear another one of Bruce Adolphe's Piano Puzzlers. Play along to see if you can name the hidden tune and guess the name of the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking.

If you're ever in Rome in December, you'll see bagpipers playing in the piazzas; it's an old Christmas tradition in Italy. But to really see the bagpipers in action, go to Mass. They play in front of nativity scenes, re-enacting the devotion of the shepherds at the birth of Christ. On Friday's Performance Today we'll hear Arcangelo Corelli's Christmas Concerto, his tribute to this Italian custom.

The Nobel Prizes were given out this week in Stockholm, Sweden. Every year since 1994 there has also been a Nobel Prize Concert, which features both a big-name soloist and a big-name guest conductor leading the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Coming up on Thursday's Performance Today, we'll hear a couple of highlights from the 2012 Nobel Prize Concert, including Christoph Eschenbach conducting the triumphant final movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1.

January is not an ideal time to travel from London to Minnesota with delicate baroque instruments. Finely crafted instruments are not made to withstand Minnesota's wintery low humidity; bows can buckle and bridges can crack. As the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment quickly learned, there is nothing to do except to glue, humidify, and persevere. Coming up on Wednesday's Performance Today, Rachel Podger and members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment play a warm concerto by Antonio Vivaldi in concert in the Minnesota chill.