Performance Today®

So you took that great trip to Europe or to Hawaii or to the ski slopes. And now you're left with a faded T-shirt or a shake-up snow globe that doesn't even begin to capture the sights and the sounds of your dream vacation. Photos can help you remember what everything looked like. But what about the sounds you heard, the foreign languages, the street noises, the music? We'll hear from two composers who solved that problem. Today's show is all about musical souvenirs: Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien," written during a trip to Rome, and Gershwin's "An American in Paris," inspired by his trip to the City of Light.

The Greek name Leonidas means "brave as a lion." Violinist Leonidas Kavakos lives up to his name in a bold performance of Karol Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 2, from a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. But Kavakos shows his tender side too in the concerto's many folk melodies. We'll hear Leonidas Kavakos' thoughts on what makes this concerto so difficult, and his performance with Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Every summer, an amazing musical gathering takes place in Vermont. Christopher Serkin, board member of Marlboro Music, sums it up this way. He says, "It's like summer camp, but for geniuses." Serkin's grandfather, pianist Rudolf Serkin, founded Marlboro in 1951. Every summer since then, young professionals and seasoned music veterans have gathered for seven weeks of glorious music-making. Today we'll have highlights from Marlboro, including a string quintet by Felix Mendelssohn.

Maybe one of the biggest disservices we do to music is to put it in a box, to focus on categories and genres and differences. The genre-bending Quartet San Francisco is wildly eclectic, making it their business to break down musical walls. Violinist Matthew Szemela says, "It's not a different language. It's different dialects of the same language." Quartet San Francisco joins PT host Fred Child in the studio today for conversation and music by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, and the rock band Jefferson Airplane.

QSF plays music by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, and more.

The Greek name Leonidas means "brave as a lion." Violinist Leonidas Kavakos lives up to his name in a bold performance of Karol Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 2, from a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. But Kavakos shows his tender side too in the concerto's many folk melodies. We'll hear Leonidas Kavakos' thoughts on what makes this concerto so difficult, and his performance with Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

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.

The nighttime has so many different moods, from passion to loneliness to the delicious tiredness you feel at the end of a long day. Whatever your favorite picture of the darkness, join us for today's show. We'll hear a thunderous performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a Theme by Paganini," featuring pianist Stephen Hough, the quiet watchfulness of Dvorak's "Silent Woods" for cello and orchestra, and the warm and gentle embrace of "Nights in Bohemia," by Antonio de los Rios.

There are workaholics, and then there's Valery Gergiev. Gergiev maintains an almost break-neck pace of conducting engagements all over the world, rarely taking a day off. One interviewer recently asked him why he works so hard. Gergiev replied, "At some point, I think, it's difficult to stop." In today's show, the man who doesn't know the meaning of down time leads the London Symphony in Brahms' Haydn Variations, from a concert last month in London.