Performance Today®

Violinist Joshua Bell remembers being a 15-year-old student at the Aspen Music Festival and School, and how it changed his life. He'll tell the story, and we'll hear Gil Shaham, Cho-Liang Lin, Ingrid Fliter, and others share their Aspen memories. And from the Aspen Music Festival, Joshua Bell joins the Aspen Chamber Symphony to play the Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn.

We tend to refer to it as simply the Aspen Festival or the Aspen Music Festival. But its full name is the Aspen Music Festival and School. Teaching and learning are a huge part of what goes on every summer in Aspen. Today, stories of learning from Aspen, including violinist Sarah Chang getting not only violin lessons, but driving lessons from her teacher, Dorothy DeLay. And cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han teach a master class to Aspen students.

All week long, PT will be coming to you from the Aspen Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado. Host Fred Child is there. We'll be featuring interviews, special on-stage events, and great performances from America's biggest summer music festival. In today's show, a gondola ride up Aspen Mountain for an informal concert, and performances by Time for Three, guitarist Sharon Isbin, flutist Marina Piccinini, the Brasil Guitar Duo, and much more.

German pianist Alexander Schimpf won the Cleveland International Piano Competition last weekend in Cleveland. The win catapults him into a new arena, with a grand prize of $50,000 and two years of concerts. But he wasn't thinking about that when PT host Fred Child spoke with him shortly after his big win. Schimpf said he was thinking of his family back home in Germany. They listened to his gold-medal performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto over the internet a week ago. You can hear it in today's show.

"My career in the theatre has been a flop," wrote Aaron Copland. It was 1939, and a stage version of a play called Quiet City had closed before it even opened. Copland had written incidental music for the show. He later reworked some of it for an orchestral arrangement. Saxophonist Christopher Brellochs obtained a copy of the unpublished manuscript for Quiet City. Brellochs joins host Fred Child to talk about the piece. And we'll hear his arrangement of Copland's original version.

German pianist Alexander Schimpf won the Cleveland International Piano Competition last Saturday night in Cleveland. The win catapults him into a new arena, with a grand prize of $50,000 and two years of concerts. But he wasn't thinking about that when PT host Fred Child spoke with him shortly after his big win. Schimpf said he was thinking of his family back home in Germany. They listened to his gold-medal performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto over the internet on Saturday. You can hear it in today's show.

It was an unusually hot day in Paris, May 29th, 1913. But the heat of the late-day sun was nothing compared to the inferno going on inside the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. It was an event that would change music forever: the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, the Rite of Spring. On today's show, music writer Alex Ross tells the story of that riotous premiere. And Jaap van Zweden leads a performance by the Dallas Symphony.

In nine minutes of ravishing music by Richard Strauss, Salome sheds her inhibitions along with her clothes in a dance for her step-father, King Herod. The scene from Strauss' opera Salome shocked audiences when it premiered in 1905. In today's show, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra plays Strauss' infamous Dance of the Seven Veils, in a concert from the BBC Proms in London.

In 1938, composer Paul Hindemith fled Nazi Germany and later came to the U.S. One of his first projects here was to write a ballet based on themes by Carl Maria von Weber. Weber's tunes were charming but insubstantial. But Hindemith took that music of limited possibilities and turned it into something spectacular. His Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber is in today's show, in a performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.