Performance Today®

In 1607, there was no such thing as time off work to mourn the death of a spouse. So when Claudio Monteverdi's wife died, he had to keep putting pen to paper, composing music for, of all things, a royal wedding. Monteverdi can be forgiven if it's not the jolliest of wedding music. But his Vespers are quietly, hauntingly beautiful. We'll hear a performance from suburban Cleveland.

Violinist Julia Fischer has been playing to packed concert halls ever since she was a child. She says, "I was already extremely conscientious when I was 10 years old. I was always aware of what it meant to go onstage and stand in front of a thousand people...I was very self-critical, and strict with myself." That self-discipline paid off. Today, she's one of the top violinists in the world. In today's show, Julia Fischer plays the Bruch Violin Concerto, from a concert in Geneva.

Heironymous Bosch painted dark, frightening pictures of hell in the 15th century, with tortured souls suffering in agony. Dante used words rather than paint in his Divine Comedy. But he came up a similar picture of hell, along with the inscription "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" on the gates. Composer Luigi Boccherini painted a lively, boisterous picture of hell, one that draws us in rather than sends us fleeing. No need to abandon hope in today's show. We'll hear Boccherini's "The Devil's House," from a concert by Mercury Baroque in Houston.

Someone once said be careful what someone mistakes you for. They just may be right. In today's show, two stories of musicians who recreated themselves after someone mistook them for something they weren't. Jaap van Zweden (pictured) was a violinist, until Leonard Bernstein handed him a baton and asked him to conduct. And Makoto Ozone was a jazz pianist, until an orchestra hired him to play Mozart. After the initial shock, both van Zweden and Ozone trained intensively to fit into their new mistaken identities. We'll hear van Zweden conducting Tchaikovsky in Dallas, and Ozone playing Chopin in Warsaw.

Quartet New Generation is made up of four young women from Germany who play recorders. They play everything from the Renaissance to the avant garde. They sometimes even put on platinum wigs and play techno dance music. The Quartet New Generation stopped by the PT studios recently for music and conversation with PT host Fred Child. They'll play works by Handel and Minnesota composer Mary Ellen Childs.

Quartet New Generation is made up of four young women from Germany who play recorders. They play everything from the Renaissance to the avant garde. They sometimes even put on platinum wigs and play techno dance music. The Quartet New Generation stopped by the PT studios recently for music and conversation with PT host Fred Child. They'll play works by Handel and Minnesota composer Mary Ellen Childs.

Daniel Barenboim is a full-time pianist. And a full-time conductor. If you think that adds up to too much, Barenboim is quick to disagree. In fact, he wants to keep up the frenetic pace. He says, "I pray every day that I will not get comfortable in my old age." In today's show, Barenboim the pianist and Barenboim the conductor, from concerts in Vienna and Essen, Germany.

In today's show, a couple of blatant cases of false advertising. Johannes Brahms promised his publisher a dour, sad, tragic Second Symphony. But what he delivered was the sunniest and cheeriest of all his symphonies. And Franz Schubert (pictured) subtitled his Fourth Symphony "The Tragic." Tune in to today's show and see if you think the label fits. We'll hear performances from New York and Amsterdam.

For pianist Evgeny Kissin, playing to a live audience is an emotional balancing act. On the one hand, he says that it's so emotionally draining that he limits the number of concerts he gives. But he also says he wouldn't have it any other way. When someone asked if he tries to forget about the audience during a concert, he was incredulous. He said, "Why on earth should I try to forget about the audience when it is for them that I go on stage and play?" In today's show, Evgeny Kissin plays to an audience at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.