Performance Today®

Pianist Emanuel Ax is endearingly humble. He downplays his own abilities and goes out of his way to shine the spotlight on others. It's charming, but don't believe a word of it. Ax is a national treasure, one of the finest pianists around today. In today's show, he teams up with the Spanish National Orchestra and plays the "Emperor" concerto by Beethoven.

Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han started out as musical colleagues. They fell in love with each other's playing. And it didn't take long before they fell in love with each other. Finckel describes their musical chemistry this way, "For us, it was like that right from the start. And I think that was one of the things that just sent up a signal to us that we were meant to be together somehow, in more ways than one." The husband-and-wife team of David Finckel and Wu Han are in the PT studios today, sharing music and conversation with host Fred Child.

Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han talk about musical chemistry with host Fred Child in the PT studio.

If it were a Hollywood movie from the 1940s, the plot would read something like, "Hero and heroine unjustly kept apart. Years pass. Hardship ensues. At long last, hero and heroine are reunited." Today's show isn't a Hollywood movie, but it does feature music by Erich Korngold, who wrote for Hollywood films in the 1940s. And we'll hear the story of a priceless Guarneri violin that got to play Korngold's Violin Concerto, after being kept away from it for a half century.

Putting conductor Gustavo Dudamel in front of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela is a bit like throwing a lit match onto a powder keg. The results are almost always explosive. But it's a superbly controlled burn. Dudamel and the SBSO gave a fiery concert of Latin American music at Carnegie Hall in New York recently. We'll hear highlights in today's show, including Carlos Chavez'"Sinfonia India."

So you took that great trip to Europe or to Hawaii or to the ski slopes. And now you're left with a faded T-shirt or a shake-up snow globe that doesn't even begin to capture the sights and the sounds of your dream vacation. Photos can help you remember what everything looked like. But what about the sounds you heard, the foreign languages, the street noises, the music? We'll hear from two composers who solved that problem. Today's show is all about musical souvenirs: Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien," written during a trip to Rome, and Gershwin's "An American in Paris," inspired by his trip to the City of Light.

The Greek name Leonidas means "brave as a lion." Violinist Leonidas Kavakos lives up to his name in a bold performance of Karol Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 2, from a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. But Kavakos shows his tender side too in the concerto's many folk melodies. We'll hear Leonidas Kavakos' thoughts on what makes this concerto so difficult, and his performance with Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Every summer, an amazing musical gathering takes place in Vermont. Christopher Serkin, board member of Marlboro Music, sums it up this way. He says, "It's like summer camp, but for geniuses." Serkin's grandfather, pianist Rudolf Serkin, founded Marlboro in 1951. Every summer since then, young professionals and seasoned music veterans have gathered for seven weeks of glorious music-making. Today we'll have highlights from Marlboro, including a string quintet by Felix Mendelssohn.

Maybe one of the biggest disservices we do to music is to put it in a box, to focus on categories and genres and differences. The genre-bending Quartet San Francisco is wildly eclectic, making it their business to break down musical walls. Violinist Matthew Szemela says, "It's not a different language. It's different dialects of the same language." Quartet San Francisco joins PT host Fred Child in the studio today for conversation and music by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, and the rock band Jefferson Airplane.