Performance Today®

Sometimes, it helps to be reminded of why music is so important. Latvian composer Peteris Vasks wrote, "Beauty and harmony are rare in life, but in music, they are possible. I say 'Yes' until my last breath, to the beauty of the world." We'll hear Vasks saying "Yes" to beauty, in his lovely Cantabile for Strings, from a concert in Monaco. Plus, the women of Anonymous 4 join host Fred Child for music and conversation.

It was a memorable collision between technology and art. A new instrument had just been invented in France: the celeste, a keyboard instrument with a sound like a tinkly set of magic bells. Peter Tchaikovsky heard it on a trip to Paris, and knew instantly that he had the perfect tune for it. Nowadays, people automatically associate the sound of the celeste with the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from his ballet, "The Nutcracker." At the premiere, the audience was astounded at the new invention. We'll hear Act II from the Nutcracker today, including that big celeste solo. Simon Rattle leads the Berlin Philharmonic.

In 1917, British composer Arnold Bax went to see the ruins of an ancient castle, where legend says King Arthur was born. Bax was inspired to write a symphonic poem about it. The result is called "Tintagel," named for that mysterious castle in Cornwall. Thomas Dausgaard leads the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, from a concert at the Concertgebouw. And Bruce Adolphe stops by for this week's Piano Puzzler.

It's Christmas Eve, and there's a big party. Young Clara gets a special present, a nutcracker. At midnight, the Christmas tree grows magically, and the Nutcracker springs to life, doing battle with an army of mice. It's Act One of "The Nutcracker," by Peter Tchaikovsky. Conductor Simon Rattle says that the more he listened to Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, the more fascinated he became by it. Today, Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic perform Act One of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker." And they'll be back on Monday's show for Act Two.

When it came to writing symphonies, Johannes Brahms entered the game relatively late. He was in his forties when he finished his first one, having labored over it for almost 15 years. The second was a much easier birth. He wrote it over the course of one glorious summer in southern Austria. Brahms joked that it was a region where "the melodies were so abundant, one had to be careful not to step on them." Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony take care with Brahms' lovely melodies, in a performance from San Francisco's Davies Hall.

In 1917, British composer Arnold Bax went to see the ruins of an ancient castle, where legend says King Arthur was born. Bax was inspired to write a symphonic poem about it. The result is called "Tintagel," named for that mysterious castle in Cornwall. Thomas Dausgaard leads the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, from a concert at the Concertgebouw. And Bruce Adolphe stops by for this week's Piano Puzzler.

Music teachers might be horrified at this idea, but one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era was almost completely self-taught. Georg Philipp Telemann had a total of about two weeks of lessons when he was a teenager. After that, he was on his own. We'll hear one of Telemann's orchestral suites, where he imagined what music from far-off places would sound like. Places like Turkey, Moscow, Switzerland, and Portugal. Plus, a Russian and a German imagine music from Spain and come up with the same title: two Spanish Caprices, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Moritz Moszkowski.

Claude Debussy once tried his hand at painting, but decided music had a much better way of depicting the glint of sunlight on water, the ever-changing undulations of the sea, and the smell of a salty mist shimmering in the air. In today's show, Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the New York Philharmonic in Debussy's masterpiece for the senses, "La Mer," or "The Sea."

Conductor Roger Norrington remembers one early-morning rehearsal with New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's. Given the hour, he had encouraged the musicians to take it easy. Instead, Norrington says, they "went off like maniacs. I just had to keep up." In today's show, Roger Norrington and the "maniacs" of the OSL, with their high-powered work ethic, perform Haydn's Symphony Number 99 at Carnegie Hall.