Performance Today®

On a lonesome drive through the mountains of Wyoming, Ranaan Meyer found himself in a place with no cell phone service. He couldn't even find a station to listen to on his car radio. With no distractions, and only the mountains for company, this music began to take shape in his head. We'll hear that music: it's called Wyoming 307, named after the area code.

The great American pianist Van Cliburn has died. He was 78 years old. On Thursday's Performance Today, we'll remember this legendary musician. We'll hear newsreel footage from his 1958 win at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. We'll hear from his friends. We'll hear from musicians he inspired. And we'll hear archival recordings of the man himself.

When he was a teenager in the early 1920s, Dmitri Shostakovich played piano in movie theaters for silent films. A few years later, he wrote a Piano Concerto that in places almost sounds like music he might have riffed for a Charlie Chaplin comedy. It's the rollicking, jazz-inflected Piano Concerto No. 1 by Shostakovich. We'll hear a powerhouse performance by Olga Kern (pictured) and the Nashville Symphony.

The great American pianist Van Cliburn has died. He was 78 years old. On Thursday's Performance Today, we'll remember this legendary musician. We'll hear newsreel footage from his 1958 win at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. We'll hear from his friends. We'll hear from musicians he inspired. And we'll hear archival recordings of the man himself.

Choral composer Eric Whitacre says, "I thought I was going to be a pop star. I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd be a classical composer." Now at age 43, Whitacre has achieved the kind of star status he once dreamed of. But not in the pop world. He's a kind of rock star of contemporary choral composers. He has nearly 100,000 Facebook fans. Has his own choir, the Eric Whitacre Singers. Some young fans have even gotten Eric Whitacre tattoos. In today's show, Whitacre leads a choir of over 100 singers in one of his own works, "Sleep."

The music of J. S. Bach is wonderful in its original state, the way the old master wrote it. But it's so flexible, so adaptable and malleable, that musicians today just can't seem to leave it alone. And lucky for us that they don't. In today's show, recorder virtuoso Bolette Roed plays a Flute Partita by Bach. And members of the San Francisco Symphony play his Orchestral Suite No. 1, in concert in San Francisco.

Coleman Itzkoff (pictured, at left) is the newest PT Young Artist-in-Residence. He's 20 and a cello student at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston. He comes from a long line of musicians, and in fact plays on a cello that belongs to his grandfather. Coleman will be with us in the PT studios all week. Today, he'll play a cello sonata by Beethoven.

Coleman Itzkoff studies cello at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.

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 Bruce is mimicking. Is it "Stand by Your Man" in the style of Tchaikovsky? Or maybe "Do Re Mi" in the style of Arnold Schoenberg? Play along, see if you can guess the tune and the composer in this week's Piano Puzzler.