Performance Today®

Composer Gustav Holst loved astrology. He called it his "pet vice" and read a book called "What is a Horoscope and How Is It Cast?" So when he was writing his orchestral suite, "The Planets," he wasn't writing about astronomical bodies in orbit around the sun. He was thinking of the astrological character of the planets like Jupiter, "The Bringer of Jollity." It's amazing what a difference a few letters can make. On today's Performance Today, we'll hear Holst's musical and astrological exploration of space.

On the day of his big audition, the young violinist Xiang Yu found that someone had taken luggage in the airplane and along with it, his dress clothes for the audition. So he wore sneakers and pajama pants. "It was an adventure," he said, "but luckily I got in." Yu is now a student at NEC, the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and he is now Performance Today's Young Artist in Residence. Yu joins Fred Child in the studio to talk about what he's learned at NEC and to play a beautiful musical poem by Chausson.

Every week on our Piano Puzzler, composer Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer. We get one of our listeners on the phone to try to guess the tune, and the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking. Play along, see if you can guess the tune and the composer. Today's Puzzler contestant is contestant is Michelle Willis from Herriman, Utah.

The vast majority of what we hear on classical radio is music written by people who devoted their professional lives to music. The exceptions tend to be colorful characters -- people who made their living doing other things, but who love music. Amateurs in the true sense of the word. On today's show music by amateur composers. We'll hear a sweet lullaby for cello written by an expert on military fortifications, a string quartet composed by an insurance executive, exciting orchestral music by a low-level clerk in the French bureaucracy, and a symphony by a chemist.

On Monday's Performance Today we'll meet Xiang Yu, our newest Artist in Residence. This violinist grew up in Inner Mongolia, moved to Shanghai at age 11, then to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory in his late teens. Xiang Yu told Fred Child that even though he pressured himself to study music intensely at a young age, his parents were not Asian tiger parents. "More like cow mom and sheep dad," he said. His parents just wanted him to be happy. Xiang Yu will perform music by Bach in the PT studios.

Free MP3 downloads, video and interviews with talented violinist Xian Yu.

Conductor Harry Christophers says for him, Handel strikes every emotion in his body. At times it reduces him to tears, but most of the time it leaves him smiling like a Cheshire Cat. We'll have highlights from the Easter sections of Handel's Messiah on this weekend's Performance Today. Plus Harry Christophers talking (and grinning like a Cheshire Cat) about the music by Handel.

In all of Johann Sebastian Bach's musical output, the St. John Passion is probably the boldest experience in terms of dramatic expression. Conductor Bernard Labadie calls it a work filled with lava-like strings and brass sections that pierce like swords. We'll hear Labadie conduct the St. John Passion in a performance by Les Violins du Roy for Good Friday 2013.

One of the most meaningful concerts in the life of Josef Haydn took place in a darkened Spanish cathedral. It was music he wrote for a Good Friday service. Recently, poet Michael Dennis Browne wrote his own words to accompany Haydn's deeply thoughtful Good Friday music. "I surprised myself," he said, "just as the great Haydn surprised himself." We'll hear Haydn's "Seven Last Words of Christ," music with with new poetry by Browne, on Thursday's Performance Today.