Performance Today®

The first musical instruments, back in the caveman days, were percussion instruments. Discarded bones, hollow logs covered with animal skins. A battery of noisemakers designed to instill fear in one's enemies and keep evil spirits at bay. Today, we'll meet a percussion instrument that would have fit right in in those early times, the lion's roar. Jerry Junkin and the Dallas Wind Symphony put the lion's roar to good use in a set of Renaissance dances. Plus, a couple of woodland sketches and one of the greatest musical sunrises ever, the opening of Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite.

The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is an amazing old concert hall. Beautiful, opulent, with great sight lines and spectacular acoustics. But up until a few decades ago, it was a hall with a dirty little secret. It was sinking into the surrounding mud. As the hall slowly settled into the ooze, the musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra happily, unknowingly fiddled away. In today's show, the story of how engineers rescued the hall from an untimely end. And we'll hear highlights from a recent concert at the Concertgebouw.

Fate. Is it a friend or an enemy? Easy answer, as far as Peter Tchaikovsky was concerned. He railed against fate, calling it "the force which prevents our hopes of happiness from being realized. It is invincible and you will never vanquish it. All we can do is subject ourselves and lament." OK, so Peter was depressed. He veered wildly between fate the friend and fate the enemy in his Fourth Symphony, with gorgeous melodies crashing into invincible, musical brick walls. Mikhail Pletnev leads the Russian National Orchestra in a riveting performance of Tchaikovsky's Fourth from Warsaw, Poland.

Two superb young violinists are in today's show. Hilary Hahn rose to stardom when she was just a teen-ager. Now in her early 30s, she made the sometimes uneasy transition from child phenom to adult star. She joins us today, along with pianist Orion Weiss, from the WQXR studios in New York. And we'll hear Augustin Hadelich in concert in Seattle. He made an arduous comeback to the violin after suffering devastating burns over 60% of his body.

Violinist Hilary Hahn performs in the studio with pianist Orion Weiss

The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is an amazing old concert hall. Beautiful, opulent, with great sight lines and spectacular acoustics. But up until a few decades ago, it was a hall with a dirty little secret. It was sinking into the surrounding mud. As the hall slowly settled into the ooze, the musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra happily, unknowingly fiddled away. In today's show, the story of how engineers rescued the hall from an untimely end. And we'll hear highlights from a recent concert at the Concertgebouw.

The piano is essentially a percussion instrument. You press a key, a hammer hits the corresponding string, and a note is produced. But is that all there is? There must be more to playing the piano than that. Today, we'll hear from three terrific pianists, Vladimir Feltsman, Nelson Freire, and Garrick Ohlsson. Ohlsson weighs in on the difficulties of the piano, calling it "a box full of diminuendos." But with those three in the driver's seat, we prefer to think of it as a box full of exquisite possibilities.

Only in the world of surrealism would a ballet called "The Ox on the Roof" have absolutely nothing to do with an ox. Or a roof. French composer Darius Milhaud wrote it in 1920, just after a two-year trip to Brazil. "The Ox on the Roof" is chock-full of Brazilian melodies and rhythms and energy. We'll hear a terrific performance of Milhaud's oxless, roofless, nonsensical ballet, from a concert in Amsterdam.

For the past 75 years, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been spending its summer seasons in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts, at the Tanglewood Music Festival. This past July, the BSO celebrated with a star-studded gala anniversary concert. PT host Fred Child was there. We'll hear highlights from that very special concert at Tanglewood, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax, and the Boston Symphony.