Performance Today®

Is an unfinished piece by a long-dead composer a historical artifact to be preserved as is? Or is it ripe with possibilities, waiting for someone to come along and finish in his or her own way? In 2007, an Italian composer did just that with Mendelssohn's unfinished Third Piano Concerto. We'll hear the result, from a concert in Calgary, Alberta. Roberto Prosseda solos with the Calgary Philharmonic. Plus, in honor of Veterans Day, we'll hear the story behind the famous bugle tune "Taps."

On November 10, 1910, Edward Elgar led the premiere of his Violin Concerto in London. Fritz Kreisler played violin that evening. On the 100th anniversary of that concert, we'll hear a 2010 concert performance featuring that very same violin. Nikolaj Znaider plays that amazing instrument, Mark Elder conducts the Halle Orchestra, in concert in Manchester, England.

Music always plays an important role in celebrations like weddings. In today's show, we'll hear Mozart's "Haffner" Serenade, written for the wedding of a nobleman's daughter. But classical music also proved to be indispensible at another very different sort of celebration: the 25th anniversary of a plywood factory in Jyvaskyla, Finland. The proud purveyors of plywood hired Jean Sibelius to write them a piece of music in honor of the occasion. We'll hear his "Andante Festivo," from a concert in Toronto.

We think of Beethoven as a giant, a composer who revolutionized music. We'll go back to the beginning of the Beethoven revolution: his Symphony No. 1, by a young and ambitious composer just finding his distinctive musical voice. Jaap van Zweden conducts the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, in concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

A rocky island, surrounded by black water, with a dark sky overhead. A boatman is rowing toward an out-cropping where, presumably, his ghostly white passenger will spend the rest of time. It's a painting by Arnold Bocklin called "The Isle of the Dead." Sergei Rachmaninoff was so taken with the painting that he wrote a tone poem called "The Isle of the Dead." In the opening moments of the piece, low strings and winds rock gently but ominously back and forth. The water lapping against the rocky shores, just as in Bocklin's painting. In today's show, Alan Buribayev leads the Brabant Orchestra in a performance, from a concert at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.

"The Pines of Rome," by Ottorino Respighi. It's not just about the the sights and sounds of nature. Respighi wanted the ancient pines to tell the history they had seen. He wrote: "The centuries-old trees which so dominate the Roman landscape became witnesses to the events of Roman life." In today's show, ancient history uncovered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos conducts a concert performance of "The Pines of Rome."

If only someone had invented the photocopier a little earlier. In 1914, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams sent the one and only copy of his Second Symphony to a conductor in Germany. Then the First World War broke out, and the symphony was lost forever. Vaughan Williams and a few friends spent a couple of years arduously putting it all back together from sketches and scraps and memories. We'll hear his reconstructed work, from a concert by conductor Mark Elder and the Halle Orchestra. Plus, we'll hear the King's Singers in a recent performance at our PT studios.

A rocky island, surrounded by black water, with a dark sky overhead. A boatman is rowing toward an out-cropping where, presumably, his ghostly white passenger will spend the rest of time. It's a painting by Arnold Bocklin called "The Isle of the Dead." Sergei Rachmaninoff was so taken with the painting that he wrote a tone poem called "The Isle of the Dead." In the opening moments of the piece, low strings and winds rock gently but ominously back and forth. The water lapping against the rocky shores, just as in Bocklin's painting. In today's show, Alan Buribayev leads the Brabant Orchestra in a performance, from a concert at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.

"This is the mark of a true genius." So says conductor Riccardo Chailly about a quick sketch the 20 year-old Felix Mendelssohn made during a trip to Scotland in 1829. Mendelssohn kept that scrap of paper for 13 years, then finally used that idea as the opening of his Symphony No. 3, his "Scottish" Symphony. Riccardo Chailly talks about the connection between the sketch and the final symphony, and leads Mendelssohn's own orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, in both the sketch and the finished version of the piece.