Performance Today®

Pianist Sergio Tiempo put on a jaw-dropping display at the International Chopin Festival in Warsaw, and the audience went nuts. We'll hear his three encores as they happened, each more astonishing than the last. Finishing with Tiempo's own arrangement: one Chopin Etude with his right hand, and *another* with his left, simultaneously. Sounds impossible, but he did it, and the audience literally screamed, shouted, and stomped their approval.

In 1895, Sir Henry Wood created a music festival that was inexpensive, informal, and accessible for everyone: the Proms in London. From the first night of the 2009 Proms, a concert last Friday, the BBC Symphony Orchestra lights Stravinsky's Fireworks, and plays Edward Elgar's overture "In the South."

Richard Tognetti is a terrific violinist, and a graceful, athletic surfer. We'll hear Tognetti lead the Australian Chamber Orchestra in concert, playing Haydn's Symphony No. 44 near some prime surfing...in Santa Barbara, California.

"No risk, no fun!" says recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute. Maute focuses on music from the late 1600s and early 1700s, when composers expected a certain degree of improvisation from musicians. Tuesday, Maute plays a Vivaldi concerto at the Library of Congress, sometimes reading the written notes, sometimes making it up as he goes.

On the 40th anniversary of the first earthlings on the moon, music that has come to be the soundtrack of space travel: "Also Sprach Zarathustra," by Richard Strauss. We have a concert performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic...and the voices of Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, from 40 years ago, and from today.

By Leonard Slatkin's count, there are over 80 different orchestrations of Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." He tapped into 15 of them to create a unique version of the work. He leads the Nashville Symphony in a performance of it at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville.

Every Friday, PT features 21st century music. This week, the world premiere of the "Mercury Concerto" by Carter Pann. 20 minutes of virtuosic music for flute and orchestra, inspired by the real-life love story of the flutist who played the premiere. (And...Carter Pann says there is a subtle hint of classic 70s rock in the opening movement.)

The great American baritone Thomas Hampson kicked off the 2009 edition of his "Song of America" tour last week. From their concert in Winona, Minnesota, Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg perform "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven," an entertainingly melodramatic song about the man who founded the Salvation Army.

Fred is hosting today from Aspen Public Radio, in Colorado. Conductor David Zinman and pianist Yefim Bronfman talk about the "total lunatic episode" in Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3, and we'll hear their wild performance with the Aspen Chamber Symphony. And this week's Piano Puzzler caller is Alan Fletcher, President of the Aspen Music Festival and School.