Performance Today®

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.

It's an ancient, simple story of boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy loses girl when she is abducted by pirates. Boy gets girl back, thanks to the intervention of a deity who is half-man and half-goat. OK, maybe the story of Daphnis and Chloe isn't so simple after all. But boy and girl live happily ever after in Maurice Ravel's ravishing, shimmering coming-of-age love story. The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel play Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, from a concert at Walt Disney Hall.

Simon Rattle joins host Fred Child today for a discussion of his favorite Brahms symphony, the third. He calls it the "autumn symphony" of the four, filled with rich colors and textures. Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in today's performance. And the members of the Doric String Quartet played a bit of a joke on their audience at a recent concert. The trickster was actually the composer, Joseph Haydn, who wrote a false ending to one of his string quartets. The audience fell for that 200-year-old joke, in a concert at London's Wigmore Hall.

Pianist Jenny Lin joins host Fred Child in the PT studios today. She's got a new CD out, "Get Happy," a set of virtuoso arrangements of Broadway show tunes written by some of her fellow pianists. Lin says, "You really have to remember that the melody is first," and confesses that she listened to plenty of Sinatra (whom she adores) in preparation for this project. On today's show, Jenny Lin talks about the project and performs five selections from the CD.

It's long been known that music has the ability to help transport us out of our daily lives. It's one of the reasons so many of us listen to it. In today's show, we have a whole hour of music about other realms of being, and higher planes of existence. "Visions of Another World," by Karim Al-Zand, "Music of the Spheres," by Josef Strauss, and a Transcendental Etude by Franz Liszt. Plus an ethereal Norwegian vision of heaven from the women of Trio Mediaeval (pictured).

Pianist Jenny Lin joins host Fred Child in the PT studios today. She's got a new CD out, "Get Happy," a set of virtuoso arrangements of Broadway show tunes written by some of her fellow pianists. Lin says, "You really have to remember that the melody is first," and confesses that she listened to plenty of Sinatra (whom she adores) in preparation for this project. On today's show, Jenny Lin talks about the project and performs five selections from the CD.

Pianist Jenny Lin joins Fred in the studio to play show tune favorites.

Every December, an unusual pilgrimage takes place. Thousands of people flock to the small prairie town of Northfield, Minnesota. They're going to hear the annual St. Olaf College Christmas Festival. It's not so much a concert as it is a worship service in music. Even though the school is small, the program has a following across the country, including national broadcasts on public radio and TV. We'll hear highlights from the 2012 St. Olaf Christmas Festival, which took place just last weekend in Northfield.

Ballet can be a wonderful medium for drama and story-telling. It can also be a pure, unbridled celebration of the human body, about grace and speed and athleticism. We've got both sides covered in today's show. Sergei Prokofiev set Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" to music, focusing on the conflict and tragedy of the story. And Alberto Ginastera's ballet "Estancia" is a high-energy tribute to the cowboys of his native Argentina. We'll hear highlights from both ballets, from concerts in Germany and Brazil.