Performance Today®

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.

Sergei Rachmaninoff's first symphony had a disastrous premiere. The critics hated it. Even Rachmaninoff decided he didn't like it. It was never played again during his life. But the piece has been resurrected, and it received a sizzling performance last month at the Proms in London. We'll take you there today on PT.

We'll hear music about two great cities from London's BBC Proms Music Festival. First, Duke Ellington's musical depiction of Harlem on a Sunday morning, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Next, George Gershwin's classic, "An American in Paris," courtesy of the BBC Concert Orchestra. Plus lots more American music for the Labor Day holiday.