Performance Today®

Pianist Maurizio Pollini has been accused of being stiff and unemotional on stage. One writer said, "There are morticians who go about their duties more chirpily than Pollini on the concert platform." That may be, but he manages to generate a lot of emotion in his performances. Pollini joins Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic for a lively - and emotional - performance of Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto.

Times were tough for Mozart in the summer of 1788. His financial life was a shambles, and he was reduced to writing a series of pitiful letters to a friend, pleading for money. But at the same time, he was also writing his final three symphonies, each of them a masterpiece. He churned them out over the course of two months that summer. We'll hear Mozart's Symphony Number 39, from a concert by James Levine and the Boston Symphony.

If your critics are accusing you of writing extravagant, self-indulgent music, maybe the best response isn't to write an over-the-top work called A Hero's Life, casting yourself as the hero. And when folks question you about it, maybe you shouldn't compare yourself with Napoleon and Alexander in your defense. But then, maybe you're not Richard Strauss, who did exactly that. Was he for real, or was it all a big joke? The story in today's show, and a performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The days of a demure piano duo, each sitting motionless and politely covering half of a piano keyboard, are over. Enter the Anderson & Roe Piano Duo. Hands fly, arms tangle, and torsos collide as Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe attack the keyboard. Anderson & Roe will be in the PT studios, playing their unique arrangements of music by Mozart and Michael Jackson.

It's a dilemma that every working parent faces, how to do right by your children while honoring your job responsibilities as well. We'll hear how violinist Lisa Batiashvili and her husband, oboist Francois Leleux manage to juggle parenthood with the demands of a music career. And we'll hear Batiashvili on a night when Leleux was home with the kids while she played the Barber Violin Concerto in Paris.

Samuel Barber's "Night Flight," inspired by his army experiences in World War II, captures the mood of a nighttime mission. Alone at night, lost in the inky darkness of the sky. Flying over an unknown landscape, filled with unseen enemies. We'll hear it, in honor of Veterans Day today. Plus, Lee Hoiby's moving "Last Letter Home," sung by the men's vocal ensemble Cantus.

Call it what you like, the conductor controversy or the soloist squabble or even the Mozart mess. In today's show we'll have the story behind the cadenza kerfuffle, a disagreement between pianist Helene Grimaud and conductor Claudio Abbado that resulted in a scuttled CD project and several cancelled concerts. And we'll hear the Mozart piano concerto that started it all.

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."

When Hector Berlioz was writing his opera Les Troyens (the Trojans), he envisioned a drama on an epic scale. A little too epic, as it turns out. Because of its massive size and the forces needed to pull it off, Berlioz never saw a complete performance of it in his lifetime. We'll continue the grand tradition of shortchanging Berlioz' vision with a set of orchestral excerpts, from a concert in Switzerland.