Performance Today®

Some musicians come from a long line of musical family members with music-making feeling like a natural part of life. Guitarist Jason Vieaux grew up in blue-collar Buffalo, New York. His Dad was an expert in appliance repair, but he has supported Vieaux every step of the way on his music career. On Tuesday's Performance Today, we'll hear Vieaux play Bach and a classical version of a jazz tune by Pat Metheny.

On Monday's Performance Today we'll explore the art of duo performance. Distinct from a performance by a soloist and accompanist, we'll hear performances by two players who have equal importance in the music, sharing the spotlight, working together to create a musical dialogue. From a Estonian brother-sister duo to a Double Concerto by Bach to a four-hand piano duo, Performance Today goes two by two.

What has two heads, four arms, twenty fingers and more than four million hits on YouTube? The Anderson & Roe piano duo. They host Fred Child in the studio to play old (Mozart) and new (Michael Jackson) classics and talk about their signature music videos, now online sensations.

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.

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.