Performance Today®

The members of the Parker Quartet were Performance Today's Artists in Residence last season. We'll check in on what they've been up to lately, and hear one of their performances, a Haydn quartet recorded in our St. Paul studio. And be sure to tune in to Thursday's show, where we'll meet this season's Artists in Residence: the men of the vocal ensemble Cantus.

It's expected for an artist to sign his or her work in the bottom corner of a painting. In this hour, the musical signature that Sergei Rachmaninoff used in a number of his works. It shows up at the end of his Second Piano Concerto. We'll hear a performance by pianist Alexander Kobrin and the KBS Symphony Orchestra of South Korea, and the sweet Schumann encore Kobrin played when it was over.

This weekend, a performance of a suite from Manuel de Falla's ballet, "The Three-Cornered Hat," by the New York Philharmonic. There were two advantages to having Pablo Picasso working on the premiere for the ballet in 1919. The first was having him paint the stage curtain with a swirling bullfight scene, in a way only Picasso could do. The second happened at a party following the opening of the ballet. Picasso grabbed a pencil and drew a celebratory laurel wreath on de Falla's bald head. Plus, composer Bruce Adolphe, who earns his laurel wreath each and every week with his Piano Puzzlers.

Nothing against Gustav Mahler's nine symphonies, but most of them are massive, angst-ridden affairs. They ponder great questions on the meaning of life and death in ways that can be downright, well, ponderous. Which makes the smaller, lighter, tender Fourth Symphony all the more charming. We'll hear three movements from Mahler's Fourth, from a concert at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. Plus, Johannes Brahms giving credit where credit wasn't due: his "Variations on a Theme by Haydn," which wasn't by Haydn at all.

It's too bad there's no DNA test to help determine who wrote a piece of music. In today's show, an orphaned symphonic prelude performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Some say Anton Bruckner wrote it, no doubt about it. Others say no way. It was Gustav Mahler, no doubt about it. The fact is, there's more than enough doubt to go around. We can't definitively say who wrote it. And from that same concert in Amsterdam, a work of much more certain parentage: a flashy, brassy orchestral work called the Sinfonietta. Leos Janacek wrote it for a gymnastic society in 1926.

When flutist Emmanuel Pahud wants to play a concerto, he has a fairly large cache of great flute music to choose from. But when he performed with the Quebec Symphony this past summer, he made a somewhat surprising choice: the Violin Concerto by Aram Khachaturian. Pahud managed to pull it off in grand style. He gave a fierce performance of Khachaturian's rollicking 40-minute concerto, veering from brash rhythms to languid, jazzy melodies to charming Armenian folk tunes.

A sparkling party quartet by Carl Stamitz, and a brainy string quartet by Beethoven. We'll hear the Quartetto Colori play a Stamitz Quartet with their unusual line-up of two mandolins and two guitars, in concert in Eisenach, Germany. And Daniel Harding leads the Bavarian Radio Symphony in an orchestration of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge."

In 1957, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote a letter to a friend. "Working on a new piano concerto," he reported. "Has no artistic value whatsoever." Well...with all due respect to Shostakovich, we happen to disagree with that assessment. In today's show, Finghin Collins plays this uncharacteristically light-hearted concerto with Alan Buribayev and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Plus, musical settings of some of the stories from Greek mythology.

He was a relatively unknown composer, 33 years old. Getting to a point where, if you're still an unknown composer, you're likely to remain an unknown composer. But despite a slow-moving career, 1875 was a good year for Antonin Dvorak. He was newly and happily married. And there was a glimmer of hope for his career: Austria gave Dvorak a stipend based on the promise of his work, some real encouragement to continue. Over the course of about ten days in May, he wrote a lilting String Serenade. This weekend, we'll hear music by the not-yet-famous Dvorak, in concert at Carnegie Hall.