Performance Today®

Every summer, Scottish-born conductor Donald Runnicles exchanges his tam for a cowboy hat, and steps into his role as the music director of Wyoming's Grand Teton Music Festival. This summer marks the festival's 50th anniversary. In today's show, Mozart's Symphony Number 40, led by the cowboy with the brogue, from last year's Grand Teton Music Festival.

"If your eyes were not the color of the moon...oh, my dearest, I would not love you so! But when I hold you, I hold everything that is...in your life I see everything that lives." Composer Peter Lieberson set those verses by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to music, as a loving gift to his second wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. She only had a chance to sing them a few times before she died of cancer in 2006. This past weekend, Peter Lieberson also died. We'll hear an excerpt from Lieberson's "Neruda Songs" in today's show.

What does music taste like? There are a variety of different flavors in today's show: The rich, dark chocolate of a Mozart Wind Serenade, from a concert in New York City. The exotic middle-eastern flavors of Camille Saint-Saens'"Egyptian" Piano Concerto, from a performance in Rotterdam. The heartiness of two Hungarian Dances by Brahms. And the refreshing sparkle of Vivaldi's "Spring" concerto, played by Margaret Batjer and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's had never had its own home. That's all changed, with the opening of the new DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, a space dedicated to rehearsing and recording and education. As part of the hall's inaugural, PT host Fred Child was there for a very special onstage event, music and conversation with conductor Ivan Fischer and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. We'll have highlights on the show, today and tomorrow.

Yesterday, we brought you Part I of our special onstage event with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, in their new home at New York's DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Today is Part II, and includes a performance of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. Conductor Ivan Fischer calls it "full of life, humor, fun...a wonderful joke." Plus, music in honor of today's Good Friday and Earth Day observances.

New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's had never had its own home. That's all changed, with the opening of the new DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, a space dedicated to rehearsing and recording and education. As part of the hall's inaugural, PT host Fred Child was there for a very special onstage event, music and conversation with conductor Ivan Fischer and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. We'll have highlights on the show, today and tomorrow.

PT recently talked with cinematographer Rob Hahn (Batman Returns, The Addams Family) about his life-long relationship with Bach's St. Matthew Passion. He told of blaring it out his apartment window when he was six, of performing it with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein when he was nine, of weeping at a recent performance where his daughter was one of the soloists. In today's show, we'll hear the 1962 recording featuring Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic, and boy soprano Rob Hahn.

In the immediate aftermath of last month's devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world rushed to help. Classical musicians have been performing benefit concerts ever since, raising money for relief efforts. In today's show, we'll go to one of the first, by the Radio France Philharmonic, given just a week after the tragedy.

Those opening four notes. They're so familiar that they're almost a cliche. How many times have we heard them and thought, oh, that again? We've heard it so many times before. In today's show, we'll hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 like never before, in a spectacular performance by the Dresden Staatskapelle. Plus, the do-it-yourself success story of American Pianist Simone Dinnerstein. She plays a Bach suite from a concert in Berlin.