Performance Today®

Performance Today is commissioning a new poem about a piece of music. This week on Performance Today, we're airing our nominees for the project, and our listeners will choose the winner. Poet C.K. Williams will be writing the poem, to be aired on the show on April 1. Today's nominee is the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony, played by the Minnesota Orchestra.

Today's show features performances that range from about as small as you can get (Jose Franch-Ballester on the solo clarinet) to enormous (the mighty Chicago Symphony Orchestra with the thundering finale from Mahler's first symphony). And yet, there are moments of both intimacy and power in each. Today's show explores the beauty of performances both large and small.

The Finnish nights were long and cold while Jean Sibelius was working on his seventh symphony. Especially since his wife was angry with him at the time. He turned to a new, more understanding companion - alcohol. Not exactly the prescribed formula for artistic success, but for Sibelius it seemed to have worked. Today's show features a 200 proof performance of the seventh by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in Amsterdam.

Last week in London, violinist Joshua Bell gave a performance of Barber's violin concerto, while on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra. The critics loved it, using phrases like "ravishing form,""rapt, confidential beauty," and "sweetly sustained lyricism." Tune in to today's show to hear Bell play the Barber concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra and conductor Osmo Vanska, from a concert last week in London.

Gustav Mahler: Fourth movement from Symphony No. 1 ("Titan") The Chicago Symphony Orchestra with conductor Klaus Tennstedt

Today's show features five world premieres. But only one of the works is actually new. Historians and musicologists are still discovering works by Felix Mendelssohn and Baroque composer Johann Friedrich Fasch. We'll hear modern-day premieres of their works. Plus one honest-to-goodness world premiere, a piano trio by Kenneth Frazelle from last year's Music@Menlo festival in California.

She's over 40 now, and her age was beginning to show. So Alice got a face lift recently. It took two years and about $160 million, but the results are smashing. Today we'll visit the newly-renovated Alice Tully Hall in New York City to hear last Sunday's grand re-opening concert. We'll hear from Hesperion XXI and the Juilliard Orchestra, under the direction of David Robertson.

For a musician, hearing is everything. If Beethoven was alive now, he could attest to that. It's tempting to speculate whether modern medicine could have helped Beethoven overcome his deafness. Doctors were unable to help Austrian pianist Till Fellner, who suffered a temporary hearing problem in 2005. The malady, a bad case of tinnitus, got better on its own. On today's show, Fellner plays one of Beethoven's piano sonatas in Washington, D.C.

Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Carnival. Call it what you want, it's just one big party in many cities around the world. We'll celebrate the day by featuring performances of Briccialdi's "The Carnival of Venice" and Stravinsky's "Petrushka." Plus, we'll hear from Brazil's Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, on tour in Florida.