Performance Today®

Napoleon's defeat inspired two noisy pieces of music. There was Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. But there was also a noisy, impetuous, militant march by Beethoven called Wellington's Victory, one of those rare occasions when the loser's name is more known than the winner. Beethoven's march is not played as often as the Tchaikovsky, but it's a fascinating piece with a curious history. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear Wellington's Victory in performance from a concert in Dublin, Ireland.

The 12-member British vocal ensemble Stile Antico joins host Fred Child for a very special performance and conversation. They sing a variety of gorgeous music from the 1500s, including a hymn by Orlando di Lasso, and talk about the legacy of British cathedral choir schools, It's music with a penetrating beauty on Wednesday's Performance Today.

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine says, "there's nothing more fundamental than holding an infant in your arms and rocking them gently to sleep." Classical composers are no different than other parents--singing, soothing, sometimes pleading their children to sleep. But many of them wrote their own lullabies. On Friday's Performance Today, Rachel Barton Pine plays a handful of little-known lullabies by well-known composers. Just in time for Mother's Day.

Doesn't it seem like people cough a lot at classical music concerts? A German behavioral economist recently found that audiences cough twice as much sitting in a concert hall as they do in normal life. On Thursday's Performance Today we'll talk with Professor Andreas Wagener who has measured this concert hall coughing and explored the bigger question: Why?

The 12-member British vocal ensemble Stile Antico joins host Fred Child for a very special performance and conversation. They sing a variety of gorgeous music from the 1500s, including a hymn by Orlando di Lasso, and talk about the legacy of British cathedral choir schools, It's music with a penetrating beauty on Wednesday's Performance Today.

Listen to the young British ensemble sing music from the 1500s.

The Budapest String Quartet was founded, logically, in the city of Budapest. The Cleveland Quartet made their home in, you guessed it, Cleveland, Ohio. But the Tokyo Quartet has never been based in Tokyo. Four bright young music students from Tokyo each moved to the United States to study, met in New York City and in 1969 formed a string quartet. The Tokyo Quartet has been a major force in the world of classical music for 44 years, but this season is their last. On Tuesday's Performance Today we'll hear a performance by the Tokyo Quartet as they celebrate their farewell tour.

1924 was a landmark year for American music. It was the year of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue first made audiences swoon. George Antheil was another American composer who loved jazz. He liked the idea of Rhapsody in Blue, but he thought Gershwin's piece missed the gritty down-and-dirty heart of jazz and blues. On Monday's Performance Today we'll hear George Antheil's answer to Rhapsody in Blue, but with a little more gravel in it: Antheil's Jazz Symphony from 1925.

Conductor, pianist and candid commentator Bill Eddins joins host Fred Child in the studio to take listeners on a tour of his favorite pieces of classical music. He talks about the unappreciated humor in Beethoven's symphonies, the sly keyboard prowess of Alicia de Larrocha, and Eddins reveals what he calls "the sexiest piece of classical music ever written." Find out the answer and get the conductor's take on classical music on Friday's Performance Today.