Performance Today®

The Calidore String Quartet is joining Performance Today this week, as our Young Artists in Residence. The four young string players are all in their 20s and all students at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. It takes musical skill, communication skills and interpersonal skills to be successful as a quartet or, as one member of the Calidore String Quartet put it, "the original reality show." The Calidore String Quartet plays music by Mendelssohn on Wednesday's Performance Today.

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 Tuesday's Performance Today, we'll hear the once-banned work from a live performance in Buffalo, New York.

Silicon Valley is a center for technological creativity and musical creativity. On Monday's Performance Today we'll spend some time at one of the great American music festivals, Music@Menlo, in Palo Alto, California. Tune in for everything from early English music to a rollicking Carnival of the Animals.

When Alessio Bax was five years old, he desperately wanted to play the organ. There was one problem: his legs were not long enough for his feet to reach the pedals. So he took piano lessons, impatient for the day when he could switch. Wouldn't you know it...he fell in love with the piano. Alessio Bax joins Fred Child in the studio on Monday's Performance Today to play music by Bach and Brahms.

There is a kind of scampering exuberance at the end the new Piano Concerto by American composer Steven Mackey called "Stumble to Grace." Mackey tells PT that it's inspired by the image of his young son learning to lift himself up, then to walk, then to run. On Friday's Performance Today, we'll hear this two year-old composition and Mackey talks about the now four year-old for whom it was written. Tune in for this special concert from Sydney, Australia.

It all began with a couple of friends who liked to drive around Boston listening to police radios and rushing to the scene of fires. Conductor Arthur Fiedler and his friend David Mugar were pondering how to attract a big crowd to their Boston Pops Orchestra July 4th events. Their mutual love of pyrotechnics led them to the idea of playing the1812 Overture and using actual howitzers during the performance. It concluded, of course, with a big splash of fireworks at the very end. On Performance Today, we'll hear the 1812 Overture, plus American folk tunes and patriotic marches for Independence Day 2013.

The great Johann Sebastian Bach had died 30 years earlier. But at that point, nobody really knew his work. It hadn't been published, and the only people who had it were devotees who passed around hand-written copies. One of those devotees was the Baron von Swieten, in Vienna. The Baron had a young friend named Mozart, and every Sunday, Mozart would go see the Baron, and play Bach. Mozart was enthralled. He copied out the music, studied what Bach had written for the keyboard, and re-arranged it for string quartet. On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll hear the Orion Quartet play fugues by Bach, lovingly re-imagined by Mozart.

A few years ago, violinist Gil Shaham was introduced to a piece he'd never heard. As his friend played the piece for Gil, his friend burst into tears. The music was so emotional. The piece is based on an old story about two star-crossed lovers. After their tragic death, they're reincarnated, and reunited as butterflies. On Tuesday's Performance Today Gil Shaham talks about discovering the Butterfly Lovers Concerto, a piece written in 1959 by two Chinese composers.

Pianist Alessio Bax joins host Fred Child in the studio to perform music by Brahms and Rachmaninoff and talk about what it's like to share an apartment with his toughest, kindest critic.