Performance Today®

American figure skater Rachael Flatt says "it's one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. It's very heartfelt, very emotional, which is great for the Olympics." She's talking about the 18th variation in Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini." Tonight at the Olympics, Rachael Flatt will skate to that excerpt in her long program. Today on PT, we'll hear the entire piece. The Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and pianist Enrico Pace in concert at the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam.

Daniel Barenboim is the pianist when baritone Thomas Quasthoff sings Schubert songs in Berlin. Then Barenboim will conduct the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a group he formed with young musicians from several Middle Eastern countries. They'll play music of Mozart and Elgar at an historic concert in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

The young Sergei Prokofiev was fed up with critics who thought he could only write avant-garde music. So he threw them a musical curve ball, his "Classical" symphony, written in a Haydnesque style. He called it "a challenge to make the geese angry." John Axelrod leads the Swiss Italian Orchestra, in concert in Lugano, Switzerland.

In the fall of 1892, Antonin Dvorak arrived in America to teach. He wrote home, "The Americans expect great things of me. I am to show them to the Promised Land, the realm of a new, independent art...a national style of music!" Americans got great things from Dvorak, including his New World symphony. The Cleveland orchestra and conductor Franz Welser-Most perform it today, from their winter residency in Miami.

Violinist Hilary Hahn joins host Fred Child to talk about her surprising new Bach project, which combines violin and voices. And Hilary Hahn teams up with pianist Orion Weiss in the studio to play a set of Romanian Dances by Bela Bartok, and Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms.

Do they love him? They *love* him. Ten years ago, the orchestra of the State Opera of Berlin (the Staatskapelle Berlin) named Daniel Barenboim "Chief Conductor for Life." Earlier this month, Barenboim and the Staatskapelle played at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and we have a highlight: Barenboim conducting and soloing in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1.

Violinist Hilary Hahn joins host Fred Child to talk about her surprising new Bach project, which combines violin and voices. And Hilary Hahn teams up with pianist Orion Weiss in the studio to play a set of Romanian Dances by Bela Bartok, and Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms. Also: you may have heard 4 minutes of Stravinsky's Firebird during Olympic figure skating this week -- we'll hear a scintillating performance of the entire Firebird suite. Franz Welser-Most conducts the Cleveland Orchestra, during one of their winter residencies in Miami.

"The lessons of humility are endless." Those are the words of pianist Abdel Rahman El-Bacha. He says that when he realized the audience was there to hear the music, and not to hear him perform musical acrobatics, it helped him to conquer his stage fright. Now, he believes concerts are moments of "pure beauty to be shared." El-Bacha shares his performance of Rachmaninoff's first piano concerto with us today, along with JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic.

Legendary Swan Songs: the final concert performances by three 20th century masters. Leonard Bernstein was almost 72 years old in the fall of 1990, conducting a concert by the Boston Symphony. He'd been suffering from emphysema for several years. In the third movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Bernstein began coughing and couldn't stop. The concert almost came to a halt, but somehow Bernstein controlled his coughing fit, and kept going. We'll hear the final movement from that performance...which turned out to be the last notes of Bernstein's final concert. Also, the final delicate encore from Vladimir Horowitz at age 83 in Hamburg. And highlights from the last concert by violinist Nathan Milstein, in Stockholm in 1986.