Performance Today®

Violinist Steven Copes (pictured) has been the concertmaster of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra since 1998. In today's show, he does double-duty: performing with the SPCO in Prokofiev's Sinfonietta, and joining pianist Shai Wosner in the PT studios for a Beethoven violin sonata.

Part of conductor's job is to be a glorified traffic cop, to make sure the music doesn't come apart at the seams. But even more important than that, it's to be a leader and a unifier, to convey an artistic vision to the orchestra. If the first part of the job description seems better-suited to younger people, it's the second part that has historically swung the baton in favor of the senior generation. Pablo Heras-Casado is a 34-year-old Spaniard who seems to have both halves in good order. Today, he leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.

Where does genius come from? Sometimes, it seems to be a combination of nature and nurture. Mozart was a child prodigy who grew up in an intensely musical family. The only thing astonishing about his talent was its magnitude. Then there are great musicians who seem to spring from out of nowhere. Pianist Rudolph Buchbinder was a child prodigy who was raised in a non-musical household, a place where the family piano was nothing more than a piece of furniture. In today's show, Buchbinder plays a Mozart concerto, from a concert in Madrid.

Every summer at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, the emphasis is on rehearsals. Concerts are almost an afterthought. Musicians might put weeks of work into a piece of music, and never perform it. In today's show, we'll hear a quartet of Marlboro musicians who saw the process through to its conclusion, performing a Haydn string quartet on the road in Boston.

Musical spirits will haunt the PT airwaves on Halloween. Gentle, blessed spirits by Christoph Gluck. The ghost of Banquo, from Shakespeare's Macbeth, by Richard Strauss. A pinch of Edgar Allan Poe. Some music inspired by Dracula. A dancing devil. And the preferred music of every movie villain who ever had a pipe organ stashed in his basement, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

They take their name from New York City's most populous borough. But the string quartet that calls itself Brooklyn Rider specializes in crossing geographical and musical boundaries. Brooklyn Rider joined host Fred Child in the PT studios recently. In this weekend's show, we'll hear a couple of their genre-bending tunes, Gypsy music from Finland and an Argentinian tango.

They take their name from New York City's most populous borough. But the string quartet that calls itself Brooklyn Rider specializes in crossing geographical and musical boundaries. Brooklyn Rider joined host Fred Child in the PT studios recently. In today's show, we'll hear a couple of their genre-bending tunes, Gypsy music from Finland and an Argentinian tango.

Somehow it seems appropriate that an orchestra dedicated to equality and brotherhood should be playing the music of Beethoven in today's show. Those themes, so prominent in his Ninth Symphony, show up in much of Beethoven's work. We'll hear conductor Daniel Barenboim and the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of Israeli and Arab musicians working side-by-side, performing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The Eiffel Tower was built for the Exposition of 1889, changing the Parisian landscape forever. But the Exposition also changed the soundscape of Paris, and of the world. Claude Debussy went there and heard Indonesian gamelan music for the first time. He was fascinated with the sounds and rhythms, and immediately started incorporating them into his music, paving the way for what would become Impressionism. The Borromeo String Quartet plays Debussy's String Quartet, profoundly influenced by his encounter with the sound of the gamelan.