Performance Today®

The Aspen Music Festival and School in Aspen, Colorado, is many things. A terrific training ground for young musicians. A popular venue for classical all-star concerts. A place of inordinate natural beauty, nestled in the Colorado Rockies. But above all, Aspen is a place to follow one's dreams. As a young violinist, Mei-Ann Chen dreamed of being a conductor. In today's show, she leads a group with big dreams of their own, the all-student Aspen Philharmonic, in the Symphony No. 2 by Brahms.

No doubt about it: opening night of Hector Berlioz's opera Benvenuto Cellini was a spectacular disaster. Berlioz sarcastically wrote that the audience "hissed with admirable energy and unanimity." Part of the problem was the conductor, who ignored Berlioz's directions. The composer reworked the overture, renamed it and led the re-premiere himself. This time, Berlioz sent a note to the first conductor: "THAT is how the music goes." We'll hear the Roman Carnival Overture the way Berlioz intended it, on Monday's Performance Today.

Composer Aaron Copland was a city slicker from Brooklyn, New York. And yet he instinctively knew how to capture the sound of the great open spaces of the American West. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony play highlights from Copland's cowboy ballet, Billy the Kid, in a special gala concert in honor of the orchestra's 100th anniversary.

Benjamin Grosvenor was born in 1992 in a town just outside London. Everyone assumed that he would follow family tradition and play the piano. No one expected that he would perform in front of thousands at the BBC Proms in London. On Performance Today, we'll hear Grosvenor's second star turn at the Proms with a concerto by Camille Saint-Saens. And Brian Newhouse will preview the famous Last Night of the Proms concert he's hosting this weekend.

Conventional wisdom says that only those who start intense musical training at a very young age will succeed. But Andrew Staupe got a relatively late start on the piano. He didn't start working on it seriously until he was a teen-ager. Staupe knew he had to make up for lost time. He says, "I really super-charged myself. And I thought, I have to learn fast and learn a lot." We'll meet this fine young American pianist today in the PT studios. Music and conversation with Andrew Staupe.

When Andrew Staupe was a child he spent a lot of time onstage, not as a musician, but as an actor and dancer. One day he heard another performer playing a Chopin nocturne on a piano backstage and was transfixed. Today he's a doctoral candidate in piano performance at Rice University and a finalist in the American Pianists Association Classical Fellowship Award. Staupe joins host Fred Child in the studio to talk about life on the stage and play music by Debussy, Mendelssohn and Christopher Walczak.

American composer John Cage cut a deep swath through the musical landscape in the last century. To modernists, he was a pioneer, a revolutionary thinker. To traditionalists, he was a madman who wrote baffling music. John Cage was born 100 years ago today. We'll celebrate his centennial with a sample of some of his music, and hear how this philosopher of sound influenced those who came after him.

Innovative American composer John Cage would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. One of his most influential pieces is called 4'33." PT host Fred Child spoke with author Kyle Gann about how this relatively short piece of music changed everything that came after it.

Johannes Brahms wasn't exactly known for writing great xylophone parts. Or any xylophone parts, for that matter. But Arnold Schoenberg apparently thought that was just what Brahms needed. He orchestrated a Brahms piano quartet, and included a juicy part for the xylophone in the last movement. And he threw out the piano part entirely. Just a couple of the "improvements" in a wild, sometimes wacky, and ultimately very satisfying makeover by Arnold Schoenberg. We'll hear it, from a concert in New York.