Performance Today®

Memorial Day has come to be a celebration, the unofficial first day of summer. It's also a day to remember our men and women in uniform. In today's show, we have some summer celebrations, and also a most beloved American work, Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings. Plus a new work by Kevin Puts that honors servicemen and women buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Every week on our Piano Puzzler, composer Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer. We get one of our listeners on the phone to try to guess the tune, and the composer Bruce is mimicking. Is it "Stand by Your Man" in the style of Tchaikovsky? Or maybe "Do Re Mi" in the style of Schoenberg? Play along, see if you can guess the tune and the composer in this week's Piano Puzzler.

Today we're featuring two amazing young pianists whose stars are rising. Conrad Tao is 17, still finishing his studies at the Juilliard School in New York. Earlier this week, Tao won a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. We'll hear him in recital in Florida. Yuja Wang is 25, and has been delivering jaw-dropping performances ever since she appeared on the international scene about a decade ago. We'll hear her in concert in San Francisco, playing Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand.

Pianist Lang Lang is a classical music celebrity, a hero to many. But he also has his own heroes. In today's show, Lang Lang talks about his idol, composer Franz Liszt. The two have more in common than you might think. Both showmen with blazing technique on the piano, both utterly fearless on the concert stage. Lang Lang gives a fiery performance of Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1, in concert with the Cincinnati Symphony.

It's climbing season again on Mount Everest, and the tallest peak in the world just claimed another four lives this week. There was no loss of life or limb when Yo-Yo Ma played what some call the Mount Everest of concertos, the Cello Concerto by Antonin Dvorak. We'll hear his spectacular performance, from a concert with the Atlanta Symphony.

Johann Sebastian Bach's music is almost like another element, another building block in the chemistry of the world. Lots of artists have thrown a pinch or two of Bach into the fire and come up with some interesting new alloy. Count Rob Moose among them. Today we'll hear his new arrangement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, including parts for banjo, mandolin, and guitar.

It's beautifully solemn in places. But elsewhere, it's almost beside itself with glee. The Symphony No. 7 by Beethoven is many things, which led one contemporary of Beethoven's to say it was evidence that Beethoven was "ready for the madhouse." In today's show, Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

Leonard Bernstein's one-act opera, "Trouble in Tahiti," has languished since he wrote it in 1952. Opera companies rarely stage it these days. But the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra just commissioned an orchestral suite based on music from "Trouble in Tahiti." We'll hear the world premiere in this weekend's show, from a concert this spring in New York.

Death stood peering over Mozart's shoulder as he struggled to finish his Requiem Mass in 1791. Mozart was ill, and seemed to know that he was in a race against time. He wrote frenziedly. But in the end, death didn't have the patience to wait for him to finish. Mozart died at age 35, leaving it to others to complete this beautiful and tormented work. In today's show, a performance of Mozart's Requiem from a concert in Amsterdam.