Performance Today®

Today marks Frederic Chopin's 200th birthday. Chopin left Poland in 1830 for a concert tour, assuming it was a short trip. But shortly after that, war broke out, and he never returned to his homeland. The last piece he ever played in Poland was his first piano concerto. Today, Daniel Barenboim performs it with Asher Fisch and the Berlin Philharmonic. Barenboim, Fisch, and Berlin all return Friday to play the second concerto. We have special Chopin programming all week, including a gala concert happening today at his boyhood home, featuring pianist Garrick Ohlsson. We'll bring you highlights on tomorrow's show.

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 Vancouver, the women's slalom is Friday and the men's slalom is Saturday, but the musical Slalom is on Performance Today. Carter Pann is an American composer, and an avid skier. He wrote a ten-minute orchestral piece that he hopes captures the exhilaration of downhill skiing. It's fun, fast, kinetic music, and we'll hear it from a concert by the Dallas Wind Symphony: "Slalom," by Carter Pann.

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.