Performance Today®

It's Christmas Eve, and there's a big party. Young Clara gets a special present, a nutcracker. At midnight, the Christmas tree grows magically, the Nutcracker turns into a dashing prince, and takes Clara on a tour of his kingdom. It's "The Nutcracker," by Peter Tchaikovsky, a holiday favorite. We'll hear highlights, from a concert by Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Cellist Zuill Bailey describes his unusual concert with the orchestra of an Alaskan women's prison.

Robin Ticciati is an up-and-coming young British conductor. When Ticciati was a teenager, he studied conducting with Sir Colin Davis. Ticciati remembers Davis guiding him through Edward Elgar's "Enigma Variations" during conducting lessons in Davis' garden. When they got to the gravely beautiful "Nimrod" variation, Davis stopped and said, "This is what music should mean to you." In today's show, Ticciati fills in for the ailing Colin Davis in a performance of, you guessed it, Elgar's "Enigma Variations," from a concert in London.

Nobody could combine retro and radical like Italian composer Ottorino Respighi. He called for both old and new in his orchestral tone poem, "The Pines of Rome." Roman trumpets depicting the march of ancient soldiers along the Appian Way. And a newfangled audio recording of a real nightingale, which shocked audiences in 1924. In this weekend's show, old meets new in a concert performance of Respighi's "Pines of Rome" from Amsterdam.

Nobody could combine retro and radical like Italian composer Ottorino Respighi. He called for both old and new in his orchestral tone poem, "The Pines of Rome." Roman trumpets depicting the march of ancient soldiers along the Appian Way. And a newfangled audio recording of a real nightingale, which shocked audiences in 1924. In today's show, old meets new in a concert performance of Respighi's "Pines of Rome" from Amsterdam.

The German vocal ensemble Calmus was born out of a nearly thousand-year-old tradition of choral music at Thomaskirche, St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig. There's been a choir there for the last 800 years. The great Johann Sebastian Bach directed it for the last three decades of his life. The five members of Calmus met while singing in the St. Thomas Choir, then went off on their own as a quintet. The members of Calmus join host Fred Child in the PT studios today for some holiday tunes, including one by the old master himself.

Calmus joins Fred Child in the studio to sing German Christmas carols and American secular favorites.

Listen to an archival interview of Fred Child speaking with Ravi Shankar from 2005.

The piano is essentially a percussion instrument. You press a key, a hammer hits the corresponding string, and a note is produced. But is that all there is? There must be more to playing the piano than that. Today, we'll hear one of the great pianists of our time, Garrick Ohlsson. He weighs in on the difficulties of the piano, calling it "a box full of diminuendos." But with Ohlsson in the driver's seat, we prefer to think of it as a box full of exquisite possibilities. Garrick Ohlsson plays a Chopin concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.