Performance Today®

Composer Maurice Ravel was a dear friend of the Gaudin family. When World War One began, the brothers Pascal and Pierre Gaudin proudly signed up for the French army. On the day they arrived, the two brothers were killed by a single German shell. On Wednesday's Performance Today we'll hear music Ravel wrote this in memory of his friends Pierre and Pascal, Le Tombeau do Couperin. And we'll sample music celebrating new life, the birth of a royal baby.

At a time of tremendous uncertainty and instability for several American orchestras, the Buffalo Philharmonic is a model of certainty and stability. That allows the Buffalo Philharmonic to focus on making music. On Tuesday's Performance Today, we'll hear the rich, warm sound of the Buffalo Philharmonic as JoAnn Falletta conducts music by Antonin Dvorak.

Russian pianist Irina Nuzova says that even though Sergei Rachmaninoff moved away from Russia, his music was always fundamentally Russian. "You can always hear in his every note, every melody," she said, "where he comes from. That his heart was there." On Monday's Performance Today Irina Nuzova and Wendy Warner join Fred Child to talk about, and to play Romantic Russian music for cello and piano.

American cellist Wendy Warner and Russian pianist Irina Nuzova are a study in contrasts, but they share one important interest: Russian music for cello and piano.

On this weekenda€™s Performance Today, we'll sample from a concert that the Boston Symphony and pianist Peter Serkin gave at their summer home in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. It was the perfect night for a concert outdoors: a temperate New England summer evening with the stars coming out overhead, and an amiable audience of 16,000 enjoying great music as Beethoven's Choral Fantasy wafted over the breeze.

On Friday's Performance Today, we'll sample from a concert that the Boston Symphony and pianist Peter Serkin gave at their summer home in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. It was the perfect night for a concert outdoors: a temperate New England summer evening with the stars coming out overhead, and an amiable audience of 16,000 enjoying great music as Beethoven's Choral Fantasy wafted over the breeze.

Every day on PT, we have concert highlights you can't hear anyplace else. On Thursday's show, we'll take you to a concert hall with what might be the best view in the world of classical music. The Shalin Liu Center is right on the Atlantic coastline in Rockport, Massachusetts. And if you draw back the curtain right the stage, the audience gets a view through a floor to ceiling window of the bay that opens into the Atlantic Ocean. Clouds dancing overhead, and fishing boats on the water provide just the right background for a performance by marimba soloist Mika Yoshida.

When the publisher saw the music for Mozart's most recent 1785 string quartet, he thought "this can't be right!" The introduction seemed to be full of wrong notes. The publisher sent Mozart a note, asking if there was any chance that the composer had sent a rough draft instead of the final composition. "Nope," Mozart responded. "I meant to do that." Coming up on Performance Today, we'll hear Mozart's puzzling and progressive string quartet, nicknamed the Dissonance Quartet, in a performance by the Orion Quartet.

A French gentleman named Alphonse de Lamartine wrote a poem suggesting that every single thing we do--from the moment we're born until our last breath, every step, every meal, every job, every kiss, every heartbreak--they're all just preludes to the real show. The show that begins when we exhale for the very last time. Lamartine's ambitious poem inspired ambitious music by Franz Liszt called Les Preludes. On Performance Today we'll hear Liszt try to capture the meaning of life and death over the course of 15 minutes of music performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.