Performance Today®

Yesterday, we brought you Part I of our special onstage event with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, in their new home at New York's DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Today is Part II, and includes a performance of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. Conductor Ivan Fischer calls it "full of life, humor, fun...a wonderful joke." Plus, music in honor of today's Good Friday and Earth Day observances.

New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's had never had its own home. That's all changed, with the opening of the new DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, a space dedicated to rehearsing and recording and education. As part of the hall's inaugural, PT host Fred Child was there for a very special onstage event, music and conversation with conductor Ivan Fischer and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. We'll have highlights on the show, today and tomorrow.

PT recently talked with cinematographer Rob Hahn (Batman Returns, The Addams Family) about his life-long relationship with Bach's St. Matthew Passion. He told of blaring it out his apartment window when he was six, of performing it with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein when he was nine, of weeping at a recent performance where his daughter was one of the soloists. In today's show, we'll hear the 1962 recording featuring Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic, and boy soprano Rob Hahn.

In the immediate aftermath of last month's devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world rushed to help. Classical musicians have been performing benefit concerts ever since, raising money for relief efforts. In today's show, we'll go to one of the first, by the Radio France Philharmonic, given just a week after the tragedy.

Those opening four notes. They're so familiar that they're almost a cliche. How many times have we heard them and thought, oh, that again? We've heard it so many times before. In today's show, we'll hear Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 like never before, in a spectacular performance by the Dresden Staatskapelle. Plus, the do-it-yourself success story of American Pianist Simone Dinnerstein. She plays a Bach suite from a concert in Berlin.

Gustav Mahler had a deep love and appreciation for the natural world. He also had a pretty good opinion of himself. When a friend came to visit him at his summer home in the Austrian countryside, the friend stopped to admire the spectacular scenery. Mahler waved his hand impatiently. "Don't bother looking at the view," he said. "I've already composed it." We'll go to a concert by the New York Philharmonic to hear some of Mahler's larger-than-life music, part of his Third Symphony.

Pianist Martha Argerich is one of those rare artists who works outside the established system. She signs no contracts, plays when and where and what she chooses, frequently cancelling performances at the last minute. And yet she inspires a reverent adoration in her many fans, who refer to her as Madame Argerich. In today's show, Madame Argerich plays Chopin's First Piano Concerto, from a concert in Warsaw. Plus, we'll have late-breaking news regarding the fate of the financially-troubled Philadelphia Orchestra.

Gustav Mahler had a deep love and appreciation for the natural world. He also had a pretty good opinion of himself. When a friend came to visit him at his summer home in the Austrian countryside, the friend stopped to admire the spectacular scenery. Mahler waved his hand impatiently. "Don't bother looking at the view," he said. "I've already composed it." We'll go to a concert by the New York Philharmonic to hear some of Mahler's larger-than-life music, part of his Third Symphony.

Mozart called him Don Giovanni. A heartless womanizer, he was a rogue and a cad, with no sense of remorse. But Richard Strauss called him Don Juan, and gave him a soul. The story behind Strauss' great tone poem, Don Juan, is in today's show, along with a performance by Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.