Performance Today®

The Greek name Leonidas means "brave as a lion." Violinist Leonidas Kavakos lives up to his name in a bold, fiery performance of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, from a concert in the Netherlands. But Kavakos shows his tender side too in Tchaikovsky's sweet, singing melodies. We'll hear Leonidas Kavakos' thoughts on what makes this concerto great, and his performance with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

Throughout history, conquering armies have been known to do some nasty, brutish things to the people they've vanquished. We'll never know if that worry was on Richard Strauss' mind when a bunch of American soldiers showed up at his door in Germany at the end of World War II. But the Americans weren't interested in murder or mayhem that day in 1945. Instead, one of the soldiers asked Strauss to write an oboe concerto for him. In today's show, German oboist Albrecht Mayer plays the Strauss Oboe Concerto, in concert in New York City.

Beethoven was inspired by the lush, wooded landscapes around Vienna when he wrote his Pastoral Symphony. He told a friend, "the birds up there, the quails, nightingales, and cuckoos all around, they composed with me." Today, we'll hear the snowbirds of the Cleveland Orchestra in Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, from a concert in their winter home in warm and sunny Miami.

Times were tough for Mozart in the summer of 1788. His financial life was a shambles, and he was reduced to writing a series of pitiful letters to a friend, pleading for money. But at the same time, he was also writing his final three symphonies, each of them a masterpiece. He churned them out over the course of two months that summer. We'll hear Mozart's Symphony Number 39, from a concert by James Levine and the Boston Symphony.

Call it what you like, the conductor controversy or the soloist squabble or even the Mozart mess. In today's show we'll have the story behind the cadenza kerfuffle, a disagreement between pianist Helene Grimaud and conductor Claudio Abbado that resulted in a scuttled CD project and several cancelled concerts. And we'll hear the Mozart piano concerto that started it all.

In a hall that doesn't even feature a real pipe organ, Andrew Davis and the New York Philharmonic still managed to pull out all the stops in a performance of Camille Saint-Saens' Symphony Number 3, the Organ Symphony. Kent Tritle, the New York Philharmonic's resident organist, had to make do with an electronic instrument. We'll hear their performance, from a concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City.

Their names come from Roman mythology. The ancients called them wandering stars, and assigned each its own personality. One is the bringer of war, while another brings peace. One is jolly and benevolent. Its neighbor is remote and mystical. Gustav Holst poured his passion for astrology into his greatest work, his orchestral suite called "The Planets." We'll hear a performance by Peter Oundjian and the Toronto Symphony.

Music and fireworks have at least one thing in common. Both are fun to dabble in. But for true jaw-dropping effects, they're best left to the professionals. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy wrote pieces that they called "Fireworks." We'll hear them in today's special 4th of July show. Plus, "Billy the Kid" by Aaron Copland, the city slicker from Brooklyn who somehow managed to capture the wide-open sounds of the American West.

Conductor Simon Rattle joins us to introduce the Symphony No. 2 by Johannes Brahms. Rattle says "this is a work where real unalloyed joy comes out, and that, in all of Brahms' output, is fairly rare." Rattle also weighs in on Brahms' gruff, very German sense of humor. And we'll go to a concert in Berlin, with Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the complete symphony.