Performance Today®

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.

At 25 years old, Narek Hakhnazaryan is one of the great young cellists in the world today. He won a Gold Medal at the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow despite receiving a notoriously offensive slight from a conductor. Hakhnazaryan has put all of that behind him and now he's introducing himself to the finest orchestras around the world. On Monday's Performance Today we'll catch up with him in Hamburg, Germany, playing the Cello Concerto by Robert Schumann.

It was a brave choice in 1939. Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly wrote a set of shimmering variations on a folk song called "Fly, Peacock, Fly," a song about escaping from tyranny. His piece was promptly banned by the Hungarian authorities in 1940, but JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic have brought it back to life in a recent concert. On this weekenda€™s Performance Today, we'll hear the once-banned work from a live performance in Buffalo, New York.

Just like any summer camp, the Interlochen Arts Camp in northern Michigan has rituals. Some are musical -- the annual performance of the Interlochen Theme -- and some involve not notes, but ice cream. We'll hear a little of both on Friday's Performance Today.

Latvian composer Peteris Vasks was once asked if his music contained sadness. He answered, "Perhaps... but it also contains a great deal of idealism. I go through pessimism finally to confirm... that I say 'yes' until my last breath to the beauty of this world." On Thursday's Performance Today we'll hear a piece called Epifania, by Peteris Vasks, in concert from Estonia.