Performance Today®

Two giant turbines loom large on the stage. Black iron hooks and chains dangle from the ceiling. No, it's not a medieval torture chamber. It's a concert venue, although an admittedly unusual one. It's the Heimbach Power plant in Germany, site of the Spannungen Chamber Music Festival. We'll hear a Dvorak piano quintet from Heimbach today on PT.

The combination of an unusually thin skin and some particularly sharp digs by critics completely deflated Sergei Rachmaninoff, and sent him into a tailspin after the premiere of his first symphony. One critic compared it to the seven plagues of Egypt. Ouch. It took years for him to recover. Luckily, his second symphony was a monster hit, still an audience favorite today. We'll hear highlights, from a concert by the New York Philharmonic.

Memorial Day began as a day to honor the fallen soldiers of the American Civil War. Today, we celebrate and honor all those who have given their lives in service to their country. Cantus, PT's Artists in Residence, join host Fred Child today for music and conversation in honor of Memorial Day.

What could be more exciting for a musician than playing concertos with the world's great orchestras? Ask Joshua Bell that question, and he'll tell you: playing chamber music. Bell says there's nothing he likes better than making chamber music, taking an audience through an entire two-hour musical journey. He sets aside time in his schedule every year for a big recital tour. In today's show, we'll hear a highlight from this year's tour, a violin sonata by Edvard Grieg.

How are your bodily fluids today? Too much black bile? Not enough phlegm? Ridiculous questions today, but in medieval times, people believed that there were four fluids that ruled our moods. Depending on the mix, you were choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, or sanguine. Carl Nielsen ran across four comical paintings based on these four temperaments, and based his Second Symphony on them. We'll hear it, from a concert by the San Francisco Symphony.

Ukrainian pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk saw everything slip away in an instant, when a car crash led to a month-long coma. Gavrylyuk has fully recovered from that accident, and his playing is more powerful and poetic than ever. We'll hear him in concert in Miami. And another musician who has come back from a devastating injury: violinist Peter Oundjian lost full use of his left hand due to a repetitive stress disorder. So he took up conducting. In today's show, Oundjian leads the Toronto Symphony in excerpts from Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4.

A 1946 Warner Brothers cartoon called Rhapsody Rabbit featured Bugs Bunny in white tie and tails, contending with everything from audience coughing to an impish little mouse, as he hammered and thundered his way through Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2 for Piano. Bugs puts in a brief appearance on the show today, before handing the reins over to the Liege Philharmonic. They'll play an orchestral arrangement of Liszt's most famous tune.

What could be more exciting for a musician than playing concertos with the world's great orchestras? Ask Joshua Bell that question, and he'll tell you: playing chamber music. Bell says there's nothing he likes better than making chamber music, taking an audience through an entire two-hour musical journey. He sets aside time in his schedule every year for a big recital tour. In today's show, we'll hear a highlight from this year's tour, a violin sonata by Edvard Grieg.

If your critics are accusing you of writing extravagant, self-indulgent music, maybe the best response isn't to write an over-the-top work called A Hero's Life, casting yourself as the hero. And when folks question you about it, maybe you shouldn't compare yourself with Napoleon and Alexander in your defense. But then, maybe you're not Richard Strauss, who did exactly that. Was he for real, or was it all a big joke? The story in today's show, and a performance by the Cleveland Orchestra.