Performance Today®

Around the turn of the 20th century, the world went car crazy. Pretty soon, the sound of the city was the blaring of car horns. When George Gershwin visited Paris, he loved the sound of the horns on the winding stone streets so much that he brought four authentic Parisian taxi horns back with him to use at the premiere of his work, an American in Paris. Leonard Slatkin leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Gershwin's homage to Paris.

The MacArthur Foundation calls it the Fellows Program. But it's better known by its nickname, the Genius Grant. Each winner receives $500,000 over five years, with no strings attached. Today, the MacArthur Foundation released its list of 2011 Fellows. Two of them are classical musicians. Host Fred Child spoke with one of them, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, about the award. The full story is in today's show.

Maria Joao Pires just might be the Brett Favre of pianists. She told one newspaper she would stop playing in 2011. Then she said she had no intention to retire at all. Now she's thinking maybe in 2014. Free agent Maria Joao Pires signed on with David Zinman and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra for a concert at the Super Bowl of summer music festivals, the BBC Proms in London. She'll play Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27.

Critics beware. History may not judge your work all that kindly. Case in point: Peter Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake. It was a big flop. Critics didn't think much of it. One said it suffered from "a poverty of creative ideas." That critic is long forgotten, but Tchaikovsky's music has lived on. Valery Gergiev leads the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in highlights from Swan Lake, from a concert last month in London.

Yesterday we heard part one of our special two-day broadcast of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, from a concert by the Pittsburgh Symphony. Today we'll hear the final two movements, beginning with the famous Adagietto. Conductor Manfred Honeck says it's not funeral music, as many people think. He says it's a love song written by Mahler to his future wife Alma. Honeck leads the Pittsburgh Symphony, from a concert last Sunday in Berlin.

The Pittsburgh Symphony just wrapped up a 12-concert European tour. Perhaps the most special of all 12 of those concerts was on Sunday, September 11th, in Berlin. Music Director Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh musicians dedicated their performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony to all the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today and tomorrow, we'll hear Mahler's dramatic Fifth Symphony from Berlin.

Critics beware. History may not judge your work all that kindly. Case in point: Peter Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake. It was a big flop. Critics didn't think much of it. One said it suffered from "a poverty of creative ideas." That critic is long forgotten, but Tchaikovsky's music has lived on. Valery Gergiev leads the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in highlights from Swan Lake, from a concert last month in London.

Dmitri Shostakovich's Ballet, the Age of Gold, is a witty and raucous farce, full of what conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen calls "the most skillfully-written wrong notes in the history of music." It's a Soviet take on the old good guys vs. bad guys story. The good guys are a hard-working Soviet soccer team. The bad guys are the greedy Western capitalists who try to exploit them. It's no surprise who wins in this delightful ballet by Shostakovich. In today's show, we'll hear highlights from a recent Proms concert in London.

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. He died at age 35, leaving it to others to complete this most beautiful of Requiems. In today's show, a performance of Mozart's Requiem from a concert at the BBC Proms last month.