Performance Today®

Religion has always sought to explain the inexplicable. What's the meaning of life? Why do we suffer? How do we get to heaven? Sorry to say, a group of disaffected 12th-century monks were too busy writing about the pleasures of sex, gambling, and gluttony, and raging against the vagaries of fate, to earn their theological bread. Carl Orff set those surprising texts to equally surprising and powerful music in his "Carmina Burana" in 1936. Today we'll hear a performance by the Chicago Symphony, from last week's opening concert at Carnegie Hall.

Conductor Juraj Valcuha has been taking the music world by storm for the last few years. He's only 36, but has already led most of the top orchestras in Europe and America. Last season saw him debuting with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, along with return engagements with other top orchestras. We'll hear a performance from Valcuha's big year. He leads the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Sergei Rachmaninoff's 3rd Symphony.

The city of Cleveland may be a diamond in the rough, but there's nothing rough about the music scene there. The Cleveland Orchestra is consistently acclaimed as one of the best orchestras in the world. Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, gives lively and inventive early music performances. And ChamberFest Cleveland just finished its inaugural season with a bang. Join us for today's show, a celebration of Cleveland.

Leonard Slatkin talks about strikes, lockouts and how an orchestra recovers from bitter contract negotiations.

A number of major American orchestras are in financial crisis this year. In today's show, we'll hear news about the Minnesota Orchestra, whose musicians have been locked out after contract negotiations failed to reach an agreement earlier this week. And we'll hear from conductor Leonard Slatkin about the tricky process of moving forward after a labor crisis is over. Slatkin is music director of the Detroit Symphony, which went through a bitter, six-month musicians' strike last year.

In today's show, two stories of inspiration - one sweet, one sinister. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma appeared on Sesame Street in the late 1980s, expertly accompanied by a trio of honkers and dingers. Three-year-old Matthew Zalkind was watching, and fell in love with the cello right then and there. Now all grown up, he plays a Faure trio at Marlboro. And Igor Stravinsky's frightening run-in with a gang of Nazi thugs in 1932 fueled the dark emotions of his Symphony in Three Movements. We'll hear a performance by the New York Philharmonic.

The city of Cleveland may be a diamond in the rough, but there's nothing rough about the music scene there. The Cleveland Orchestra is consistently acclaimed as one of the best orchestras in the world. Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, gives lively and inventive early music performances. And ChamberFest Cleveland just finished its inaugural season with a bang. Join us for today's show, a celebration of Cleveland.

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.

British pianist Imogen Cooper is known for the beauty and emotional depth of her playing. She's especially admired for her interpretations of Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart. In today's show, she plays Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, in concert in Newcastle, England. Bright and sunny outer movements shelter a wonderfully dark, tragic slow movement at its core. Cooper gives both darkness and light their due, in a performance with Thomas Zehetmair and the Northern Sinfonia.