Performance Today®

Today is Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, a celebration of Mexican heritage and culture. We'll celebrate the day by featuring music of Mexican composers and performers. There's a lot of great classical music happening south of the border. Join us for a sampling, on Performance Today.

Australia is the land of kangaroos and didgeridoos. And cute, cuddly koalas (pictured). If you go there, expect to find great music as well. In hour one of today's show, we'll focus on music and musicians from down under, including the Melbourne Symphony, the Australia Ensemble, and Saffire: the Australian Guitar Quartet.

If you're a fan of the piano, you'll want to tune in to today's show, where the ivories will get a workout. We'll feature Stephen Hough playing Rachmaninoff with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Yundi Li going solo, playing a Chopin scherzo. And Jon Kimura Parker joins cellist Lynn Harrell for a Beethoven sonata.

Critics don't always warm up to a new work right away. But Finnish Composer Magnus Lindberg set critics abuzz with the premiere of his new work for orchestra, "Behold the Sun." They used words like, "glittering,""extravagant," and "opulent." As part of our weekly 21st century feature, the Oslo Philharmonic and conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste perform this masterful new work.

Anyone who's just starting a new job wants to make a big splash, hit the ground running, impress the boss and the new colleagues. Joseph Haydn was no different. He was 29 and just starting his job working for Prince Esterhazy. Haydn was pretty savvy. To start things off right with the Prince's musicians, Haydn wrote a symphony where everybody got big solos. On today's show, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra makes a big splash with that symphony, Haydn's sixth.

In an era when the average life span was thirty-something, composer Jean-Philippe Rameau lived to the ripe old age of 80. He composed one of his last works, the opera "Les Paladins," at age 76. But don't call it stodgy or doddering. If anything, it was ahead of its time. On today's show, Nicholas McGegan leads the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in the orchestral suite from Rameau's "Les Paladins."

Many composers have disavowed their early works. Some have gone so far as to destroy everything they had written up to a certain time. Antonin Dvorak was one of them. He called his early years his "mad period," and even went so far as to take a knife to the manuscript of one work and scratch out the date on the title page. We'll hear that work, his third symphony, on today's show.

If you're a fan of the piano, you'll want to tune in to today's show, where the ivories will get a workout. We'll feature Stephen Hough playing Rachmaninoff with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Marc-Andre Hamelin going solo, playing music by Bulgarian composer Pancho Vladigerov. And Jon Kimura Parker joins cellist Lynn Harrell for a Beethoven sonata.

For an actor, making it big in Hollywood is the epitome of success. But for a classical composer? Most consider the concert hall more of a barometer of success. Many composers have dabbled with composing music for films, however. On today's show, we'll hear music for the big screen, by Dmitri Shostakovich (pictured), Sergei Prokofiev, and Toru Takemitsu.