Performance Today®

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.

QSF plays music by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, and more.

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.

Like many watershed moments, the one that happened to pianist Simone Dinnerstein was painful and life-altering. She calls it her "nightmare performance," one where she suffered a serious memory lapse. It caused her to re-evaluate everything about how she plays, how she practices, how she learns music. In today's show, Dinnerstein shares how she got back on track after that, and plays a Beethoven Piano Concerto in Copenhagen.

The nighttime has so many different moods, from passion to loneliness to the delicious tiredness you feel at the end of a long day. Whatever your favorite picture of the darkness, join us for today's show. We'll hear a thunderous performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a Theme by Paganini," featuring pianist Stephen Hough, the quiet watchfulness of Dvorak's "Silent Woods" for cello and orchestra, and the warm and gentle embrace of "Nights in Bohemia," by Antonio de los Rios.

There are workaholics, and then there's Valery Gergiev. Gergiev maintains an almost break-neck pace of conducting engagements all over the world, rarely taking a day off. One interviewer recently asked him why he works so hard. Gergiev replied, "At some point, I think, it's difficult to stop." In today's show, the man who doesn't know the meaning of down time leads the London Symphony in Brahms' Haydn Variations, from a concert last month in London.

Jordan Dodson, the newest PT Young Artist-in-Residence, wraps up his residency with us today. This week, he's played everything from J.S. Bach to bossa nova to contemporary American music, all with remarkable technique and depth of feeling. Tune in today for Jordan's last day in the PT studios. He'll talk about his plans for the future, and he'll play a Grand Duo for Violin and Guitar by Mauro Giuliani, along with violinist Nadir Khashimov.

Youth is wasted on the young, or so the saying goes. Meaning that some people think they could make better use of all that energy and enthusiasm and fearlessness than the ones who actually possess it. If you're one of those people, you're sure to change your mind today. We'll hear performances by a bunch of twenty-somethings who have youthful energy and mature musicianship bursting from every pore: two soloists from the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth (pictured), and the newest PT Young Artist-in-Residence, guitarist Jordan Dodson.