Performance Today®

We all have our little morning rituals. Sometimes it's just habit. But when it's intentional, the way you start your day says a lot about you. For Pianist Andras Schiff, it's almost always the same. He spends an hour or so playing preludes and fugues from J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Schiff never tires of it. He says, "As long as I live and I am lucky to be in good health, I want to continue to explore the mysteries of this music." Today marks the start of a four-day series of music and conversation with Andras Schiff and PT host Fred Child, on Bach's vast and mysterious Well-Tempered Clavier.

PT host Fred Child sat down with Andras Schiff recently at the 92nd Street Y in New York to take a long look at the the subtleties, nuances and challenges of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

The Roma people (also known as Gypsies) have long lived on the fringes of Eastern European society. But even though they themselves have been marginalized, their influence on classical music has not. In today's show, we'll hear Haydn's "Gypsy Rondo" Trio and the world premiere of Mark O'Connor's "March of the Gypsy Fiddler."

No one was able to save composer Marcel Tyberg from a sad death in the Nazi concentration camps in 1944. But a valiant effort over the last 70 years involving one of Tyberg's students, conductor JoAnn Falletta, and the Buffalo Philharmonic, was successful in saving much of his music. JoAnn Falletta joins host Fred Child today to tell the story of Marcel Tyberg and her trip to Croatia to conduct his Second Symphony in the tiny town where Tyberg composed it.

Ferdinand Schubert was a packrat, and thank goodness for that. Ferdinand was the brother of composer Franz Schubert. When Robert Schumann came to visit in 1839, Schumann was surprised to find stacks of music lying all around the apartment. Franz Schubert had died a decade earlier, and among the mess, Schumann discovered an unknown masterpiece. It's come to be called the "Great Symphony," Schubert's Symphony No. 9. We'll hear a concert in London. Sir Charles Mackerras conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.

On Thanksgiving Day, we'll feature music by great American composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Martin Frost, the virtuoso Swedish clarinetist, plays Copland's jazzy clarinet concerto. We'll hear Bernstein's overture to Candide, from a concert in Luxembourg. And Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony from the Tanglewood Music Festival, about 150 miles west of the site of the very first Thanksgiving feast in 1621.

No one was able to save composer Marcel Tyberg from a sad death in the Nazi concentration camps in 1944. But a valiant effort over the last 70 years involving one of Tyberg's students, conductor JoAnn Falletta, and the Buffalo Philharmonic, was successful in saving much of his music. JoAnn Falletta joins host Fred Child today to tell the story of Marcel Tyberg and her upcoming trip to Croatia to conduct his Second Symphony in the tiny town where Tyberg composed it.

Silicon Valley is a center for technological creativity and musical creativity. In today's show, we'll spend a full hour at one of the great American music festivals, the Music@Menlo Festival in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, California. Everything from early English music to a rollicking hendectet, a piece for 11 players. We'll hear 11 of Menlo's finest in Camille Saint-Saens' (pictured) "Carnival of the Animals."

Chen Yi was a classical musician in China at the worst possible time, during the Cultural Revolution, when all Western art was banned. Chinese authorities searched her home, and took away all her family's classical recordings. Chen Yi herself was sent off to a labor camp. She held onto her music in her heart and her memory until the political climate changed. Chen Yi is now a successful composer living in the West. We'll hear one of her works, from a concert in St. Paul.