Performance Today®

All this week on PT, we're taking a look at some of this year's Grammy-nominated recordings, leading up to this Sunday's Grammy Awards. On today's show, highlights from new CDs by cellist Matt Haimovitz, pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, and the Trondheim Soloists. Plus, Bruce Adolphe joins host Fred Child for an award-worthy Piano Puzzler.

Pianist Robert Levin believes in taking risks during performances. Not for his own glorification, but to deepen the level of communication between artist and audience. And for the simple fact that, in his view, to risk nothing is to achieve nothing. In today's show, Robert Levin takes risks, improvising his own cadenzas in a Mozart piano concerto, with the Nashville Symphony. Nicholas McGegan conducts.

In a hall that doesn't even feature a real pipe organ, Andrew Davis and the New York Philharmonic still managed to pull out all the stops in a performance of Camille Saint-Saens' Symphony Number 3, the Organ Symphony. Kent Tritle, the New York Philharmonic's resident organist, had to make do with an electronic instrument at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. Plus, the best birthday present ever, Richard Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll," written as a surprise birthday present for his wife, Cosima.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director Gustavo Dudamel are just wrapping up a very successful European tour, with stops in Madrid, London, Paris, and Vienna. We'll hear from their concert at London's Barbican Hall, where one critic said it was "impossible not to be swept away." Dudamel and the LA Phil play Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in London.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director Gustavo Dudamel are just wrapping up a very successful European tour, with stops in Madrid, London, Paris, and Vienna. We'll hear from their concert at London's Barbican Hall, where one critic said it was "impossible not to be swept away." Dudamel and the LA Phil play Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in London.

"O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable. Life first oppresses and then soothes, as fancy takes it. Poverty and power, it melts them like ice." Those fatalistic words are the first and last ones we hear in Carl Orff's masterpiece, Carmina Burana. Along the way, the text makes a few interesting diversions, from drinking to debauchery to the pleasures of spring. We'll hear a performance from a concert in Montreal.

He tilted at windmills and went to battle with armies of sheep. Miguel de Cervantes' mad hero, Don Quixote, has been a classic literary figure since the early 1600s. In today's show, a full hour of nothing but the Don and his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza, in works by Georg Philipp Telemann and Richard Strauss.

Sergei Rachmaninoff's creative output can serve as a reminder never to give up. He wrote dozens and dozens of great works as a young man. In the last 25 years of his life, only a handful. He thought his composing days were over. But his very last work turned out to be one of the greatest he ever wrote. We'll hear Rachmaninoff's swan song, his Symphonic Dances, from a concert in Paris.

Pianist Helene Grimaud says Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto is "totally exhilarating" for both soloist and listeners alike. She says that when she plays it, "It's like he's right there." Meaning Beethoven, of course. We'll hear Helene Grimaud channeling Beethoven, when she performs the Emperor Concerto in Beethoven's home town of Bonn, Germany. Plus, birthday wishes to composers Franz Schubert and Philip Glass.