Performance Today®

Pianist Martha Argerich is one of those rare artists who works outside the established system. She signs no contracts, plays when and where and what she chooses, frequently cancelling performances at the last minute. And yet she inspires a reverent adoration in her many fans, who refer to her as Madame Argerich. In today's show, we'll go to a concert in Switzerland where Madame Argerich actually showed up and played a Mozart concerto.

For the past 75 years, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been spending its summer seasons in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts, at the Tanglewood Music Festival. This past July, the BSO celebrated with a star-studded gala anniversary concert. PT host Fred Child was there. We'll hear highlights from that very special concert at Tanglewood, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Boston Symphony.

We know that on at least one occasion, rock guitar legend Carlos Santana did what PT listeners do every day. He tuned his car radio to a classical music station. One of the tunes he heard that day jumped out and grabbed him, wouldn't let go. He had no idea what it was. After a little detective work and with the help of a record store clerk, Santana solved the mystery. We'll hear that tune, from Johannes Brahms' Third Symphony, and the sultry, smoky version Santana incorporated into his "Love of my Life."

Teacher and pupil both had wicked senses of humor. But the teacher always maintained a certain emotional distance in his music, more comedy and less pathos. It was the student who ventured into darker emotional corners. In today's show, a work by the student, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His String Quartet No. 15 is almost unrelentingly dark. Mozart dedicated the work to his teacher, the sunny, funny Joseph Haydn.

Maria Schneider is a jazz composer based in New York City. She doesn't usually write music in the classical genre. But the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra recently commissioned her to write a piece for soprano and chamber orchestra. This weekend, we'll hear the world premiere of Schneider's "Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories," from a concert by Dawn Upshaw and the SPCO.

If you remember the comic science fiction series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," you know that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42. Gustav Mahler asked himself that very same question, and came up with a slightly different answer. His response? A massive symphony known as the Resurrection Symphony, which addresses questions of life and death and what might lie beyond death. We'll hear highlights from a concert by Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic.

Two American scientists won the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday. Something about "G-protein-coupled receptors." It's all very mysterious and important and hard to understand. If only Alexander Borodin was still alive, he could translate for us. Borodin was perhaps the only professional chemist and composer. He never won a Nobel Prize, but did have an important chemical reaction named for him. History remembers him more for his music, though. We'll hear his Symphony No. 2, from a concert in Amsterdam.

Jonathan Biss is a sensitive performer and a deep musical thinker. His favorite composer is Robert Schumann. Biss says, "There's nothing in Schumann that isn't at least bittersweet...He's the one composer who really gave voice to all of our vulnerability." Today and tomorrow, Jonathan Biss joins host Fred Child in the studio for music and conversation about this most poetic of composers.

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.