Performance Today®

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.

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.

Part of conductor's job is to be a glorified traffic cop, to make sure the music doesn't come apart at the seams. But even more important than that, it's to be a leader and a unifier, to convey an artistic vision to the orchestra. If the first part of the job description seems better-suited to younger people, it's the second part that has historically swung the baton in favor of the senior generation. Pablo Heras-Casado is a 34-year-old Spaniard who seems to have both halves in good order. Today, he leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.

Violinist Steven Copes (pictured) has been the concertmaster of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra since 1998. In today's show, he does double-duty: performing with the SPCO in Prokofiev's Sinfonietta, and joining pianist Shai Wosner in the PT studios for a Beethoven violin sonata.

Part of conductor's job is to be a glorified traffic cop, to make sure the music doesn't come apart at the seams. But even more important than that, it's to be a leader and a unifier, to convey an artistic vision to the orchestra. If the first part of the job description seems better-suited to younger people, it's the second part that has historically swung the baton in favor of the senior generation. Pablo Heras-Casado is a 34-year-old Spaniard who seems to have both halves in good order. Today, he leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.

Where does genius come from? Sometimes, it seems to be a combination of nature and nurture. Mozart was a child prodigy who grew up in an intensely musical family. The only thing astonishing about his talent was its magnitude. Then there are great musicians who seem to spring from out of nowhere. Pianist Rudolph Buchbinder was a child prodigy who was raised in a non-musical household, a place where the family piano was nothing more than a piece of furniture. In today's show, Buchbinder plays a Mozart concerto, from a concert in Madrid.

Every summer at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, the emphasis is on rehearsals. Concerts are almost an afterthought. Musicians might put weeks of work into a piece of music, and never perform it. In today's show, we'll hear a quartet of Marlboro musicians who saw the process through to its conclusion, performing a Haydn string quartet on the road in Boston.

Musical spirits will haunt the PT airwaves on Halloween. Gentle, blessed spirits by Christoph Gluck. The ghost of Banquo, from Shakespeare's Macbeth, by Richard Strauss. A pinch of Edgar Allan Poe. Some music inspired by Dracula. A dancing devil. And the preferred music of every movie villain who ever had a pipe organ stashed in his basement, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.