Performance Today®

In preparation for Saturday's "Last Night of the Proms," Fred Child chats with SymphonyCast's Brian Newhouse from London. Wea€™ll stay at the Proms for Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony from Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic, and cellist Alban Gerhardt playing Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto with Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony.

We'll have a Mozart symphony in each hour of today's show. In the first, we'll go to Amsterdam to hear Nikolaus Harnoncourt lead the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in a stirring rendition of the "Haffner" Symphony. And, in our second hour, Hans Graf conducts the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in a performance of Mozart's 25th Symphony in St. Paul.

For several generations of Americans, the first place that they heard classical music was in cartoons. Be it Disney's "Fantasia," Looney Tunes or something fairly fresh like "Wall-E," great music has found its way to our ears while accompanying animation. We'll spend an hour with music made famous by cartoons, celebrating the centennial of the birth of composer Raymond Scott and talking to Lang Lang about how "Tom and Jerry" made him want to become a pianist.

Days after a cease fire was negotiated between Georgia and Russia, conductor Valery Gergiev flew to South Ossetia to lead the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra in a concert in front of Tskhinvali's bomb-damaged parliament building. We'll go there to hear him conduct music from Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony and Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony.

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine believes that Beethoven's Violin Concerto isn't an entirely original piece. In fact, she'll demonstrate that many of its themes showed up earlier in a concerto by Franz Clement, the violinist who premiered Beethoven's concerto. She'll perform some of each with Jose Serebrier and the Royal Philharmonic.

We'll spend most of our second hour with music inspired by summer. The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet plays Samuel Barber's "Summer Music" in Cleveland. And violinist Joshua Bell plays "Spring" and "Summer" from Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" with the UBS Festival Chamber Orchestra at California's Festival del Sole.

Pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin has been getting raves for his collection of Haydn piano sonatas, as well as a Gramophone Award and a Grammy nomination. We'll go to Colorado's Aspen Festival to hear him play one of Haydn's sonatas, as well as an etude that Hamelin wrote, inspired by Johann Goethe's poem, "Erlkonig."

A lot of outstanding orchestras perform at London's BBC Proms. So what does the top hometown band, the London Symphony, do to re-assert its status as one of the best? At a concert two weeks ago, Valery Gergiev led them in Tchaikovsky's complete music for the ballet, "Sleeping Beauty," all three-plus hours of it. We'll have excerpts from that concert both today and tomorrow.

We'll spend most of our second hour with music inspired by summer. The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet plays Samuel Barber's "Summer Music" in Cleveland. And violinist Joshua Bell plays "Spring" and "Summer" from Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" with the UBS Festival Chamber Orchestra at California's Festival del Sole.