Performance Today®

As much as we strive to be a color-blind society, the fact is, we're not. And there are few places where the color divide is as prominent as in classical music. Violinist and educator Aaron Dworkin joins us today to talk about his experience growing up as a classical musician and a person of color. And he talks about the Sphinx Organization he founded to promote diversity in classical music.

Last weekend, the 2012 Sphinx Competition was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The competition is held every year, and is open to young African-American and Latino string players. We'll hear from this year's winner, 18-year-old cellist Gabriel Cabezas. He played the Elgar Cello Concerto in his winning performance on Sunday.

If music be the food of love, then we'll play on. We'll hear stories of love and passion in today's show, and the music that goes with them. In "Vince and Jan: 1945," a son looks back to World War II and the roots of his parents' long love affair. And the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays music from the familiar story of a young love that didn't survive, "Romeo and Juliet."

"This music is so expressive," pianist Simone Dinnerstein says, "it sounds as if it's about to break into song, or, in this case, 'break into text.'" She joins Fred Child in the studio to talk about musical narratives and play pieces by Bach and by Daniel Felsenfed inspired by Leonard Cohen.

Faced with a choice between life and death on her wedding night, Scheherazade spun a set of fabulous tales (1001 of them, to be exact). They kept her husband intrigued and kept his sword at bay. Composer Hector Berlioz used musical story-telling to capture the romantic attentions of a woman he loved. Two sets of urgent, life-altering tall tales are in today's show, Carl Nielsen's "Aladdin Suite" and Berlioz'"Symphonie Fantastique."

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. Play along. See if you can guess the tune and the composer.

The last applause Johannes Brahms ever heard was for his Fourth Symphony. He was dying of cancer. But he went to hear Hans Richter conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. The performance received a big ovation. We'll never know if the echo of that applause was in Brahms' ears when he died a month later. In today's show, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic earn a big ovation for their performance of Brahms' Fourth Symphony.

"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." Those opening lines from Dickens'"A Tale of Two Cities" are burned into almost everyone's consciousness. But what about the rest of the book? Who can quote that? In today's show, we'll have another great opening line, the sunrise from "Also Sprach Zarathustra." Everyone knows it from the film "2001: A Space Odyssey." Plus the part no one remembers, the rest of the half-hour tone poem by Richard Strauss.

Paul Jacobs is one of this country's greatest organists and for the first time ever, he plays in the PT studios. An organ? In the studio? Listen to the interview with Fred Child to find out how, and to Jacob's performance to discover the truly infinite variety of sounds and textures that are possible with this instrument.