Performance Today®

Today we celebrate the 100th birthday of an American original, composer Alan Hovhaness. He was someone who drew his inspiration from the natural world, and from the musical traditions of the Far East. Hovhaness grew up on the east coast, but settled in the Pacific Northwest to be near his beloved mountains. In today's show, we'll hear Hovhaness' best-known work, the symphony he called "Mysterious Mountain."

No one was harder on himself than Peter Tchaikovsky. He had this to say about his first symphony: "Despite all its glaring deficiencies I have a soft spot for it, for it is a sin of my sweet youth." Take that with the big grain of salt it deserves. Tchaikovsky's First, neither glaring nor deficient, is in today's show, from a concert in Hamburg, Germany.

Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes was a larger-than-life character who created larger-than-life characters, most notably, Don Quixote. Guitarist William Kanengiser was fascinated by 16th century Spain in which men clashed swords with Moorish soldiers and windmills, real and imagined, and he began collecting music from that era. The men of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet play music from the time of Cervantes from a live concert in South Carolina.

Igor Stravinsky borrowed all of the tunes from his ballet, "Pulcinella," from Italian music of the eighteenth century. But he put his own musical fingerprints on it. It's a delightful mix of old and new. We'll go to New York to hear a performance of the "Pulcinella" Suite by the New York Philharmonic.

Ever since Dmitri Shostakovich premiered his fifth symphony in 1937, critics and musicians have been arguing over what it means. The work is powerful; no one disputes that. But is it power that defies authority, or celebrates it? That's the sticking point. You can hear the final two movements on today's show and decide for yourself. Yuri Temirkanov leads the St. Petersburg Philharmonic of Russia, in concert in Birmingham, England.

Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes was a larger-than-life character who created larger-than-life characters, most notably, Don Quixote. Guitarist William Kanengiser was fascinated by 16th century Spain in which men clashed swords with Moorish soldiers and windmills, real and imagined, and he began collecting music from that era. The men of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet play music from the time of Cervantes from a live concert in South Carolina.

Sergei Rachmaninoff didn't give his second piano concerto a nickname, but he might justifiably have called it his Concerto Hypnotica. He wrote it under the influence of hypnotic suggestion, after a particular nasty bout of writer's block. He even dedicated the piece to his hypnotherapist. Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes gives a mesmerizing performance of Rachmaninoff's Second, from a concert in Bergen, Norway.

The woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) has been around for a couple of centuries. One group in particular, though, has been revolutionizing how the music world thinks about quintets. The Imani Winds have been together since 1997, writing much of their own music, and commissioning new works by other composers. As a result, the quintet landscape has forever changed. In today's show, the members of the Imani Winds join host Fred Child in the studio for music and conversation.

Nobody wrote lonely, gut-wrenching, all-alone-in-the-middle-of-the-night music like Dmitri Shostakovich. His music often has an intensity that borders on painful, that puts you outside your comfort zone. Which makes his Symphony Number 9 all the more surprising. Think of it as Shostakovich lite: less angst, fewer calories. Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in Shostakovich's sparkling Ninth Symphony, from a concert in San Francisco.