Performance Today®

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.

We'll conclude two days of music from last Thursday's final American concert by the Beaux Arts Trio. The legendary piano trio performed an all-Schubert program at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. On today's show, they'll play Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1.

On the grounds of a vineyard in California's Napa Valley, violinist Joshua Bell recently led the UBS Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra in a concert. We'll hear them perform an arrangement for string orchestra that Gustav Mahler made of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" String Quartet.

We'll conclude two days of music from last Thursday's final American concert by the Beaux Arts Trio. The legendary piano trio performed an all-Schubert program at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. On today's show, they'll play Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1.

Last Thursday, the legendary Beaux Arts Trio played its final American concert at the venue where it debuted 53 years ago: The Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. We'll take you there for the final piece on the program, a piano trio by Schubert, followed by an encore by Dvorak.

A Chinese folk tale became music in the hands of composers Chen Gang and He Zhanhao. And violinist Gil Shaham decided that he wanted to share this beautiful piece with the world. He's joined by Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony for the "Butterfly Lovers" Violin Concerto.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of the birth of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, we'll have performances of his work from London's BBC Proms. Cellist Han-Na Chang is the soloist with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales for three meditations from Bernstein's "Mass." And clarinetist Michael Collins performs Bernstein's "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs" with Charles Hazelwood and the BBC Concert Orchestra.

This weekend on PT, pianist Jon Kimura Parker joins us for a conversation and music of Alexina Louie and Peter Schickele. Then we are off to Portland, OR for a performance by a string quartet from San Francisco, CA. Quartet San Francisco plays an arrangement of Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk".

Richard Strauss took works of literature and translated them into instrumental pieces for orchestra that he called "tone poems." We'll have a pair of them from concerts in Europe. Christoph von Dohnanyi leads the North German Radio Symphony in "Don Juan" in Hamburg, Germany. Then Mark Elder conducts the Halle Orchestra in "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" at London"s BBC Proms.