Performance Today®

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.

When Beethoven wrote his Triple Concerto in 1803, he pointed out to his publisher that the piece was unique. That was more than 200 years ago -- it's still (nearly!) unique today: a piece for *three* soloists and orchestra. We'll hear it from a special concert this year in Hamburg. Alan Gilbert conducting the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Veronika Eberle, and cellist Gustav Ravinius. And this week's 21st century work is a neo-Romantic symphonic poem by Canadian composer Allan Gilliland: "Shadows and Light."

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.

If you think musical chaos began in the 20th century, you'll have to adjust your calendar by about 200 years. When Jean-Fery Rebel was writing a ballet about the creation of the world in 1738, he threw caution to the wind, and threw every note in the scale into one crashing, grinding, tooth-rattling opening chord. It's utter chaos, like the world he was trying to depict. Happily, the music quickly evolves into a set of charming dances. We'll hear a performance of music two centuries ahead of its time, by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.

When Sergei Prokofiev's First Piano Concerto premiered in 1918 in New York, one critic called it "a duel, a battle to the death between the pianist and the piano." He said the piano could be heard "shrieking, groaning, howling, and fighting back." Funny how what's outrageous to listeners in one century is embraced by another. The concerto now gets a warm reception from audiences. We'll hear Bulgarian pianist Plamena Mangova performing it in Madrid, Spain.

When it came to writing symphonies, Johannes Brahms was a late bloomer. He didn't publish his first symphony until he was in his mid-forties. He claimed that the shadow of Beethoven was looming too large over him. Brahms ultimately overcame his uneasiness about it, and wrote four symphonic masterpieces. We'll hear his fourth symphony in today's show, performed by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.

In a 1980 interview with NPR, composer Aaron Copland chuckled when he talked about misconceptions people have about his ballet, "Appalachian Spring.""I was not thinking about the Appalachian Mountains when I wrote it. People are very disappointed to hear me say that." In today's show, the story of how the "Ballet for Martha" became "Appalachian Spring," and a performance by the Knights in Stillwater, Minnesota. Plus, Bruce Adolphe stops by for a new Piano Puzzler.