Performance Today®

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.

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.