Performance Today®

We're going to spend part of each day this week exploring improvisation in classical music. It used to be a vital part of every musician's skill set. What changed and why? We'll have conversations with a pair of experts on baroque improvisation - guitarist Rolf Lislevand and recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute - and listen to them play music of Vivaldi and Johann Kapsberger.

Join us for an interview with the Ying Quartet from this summer's Aspen Music Festival. They'll play music of Mendelssohn, and also Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-Chung.

In honor of the opening of the Olympics in Beijing, we'll present music of Chinese and Chinese-American composers and performers. Among them is pianist Lang Lang, who plays five Chinese songs in Fort Worth. And the Ying Quartet will talk about and play music of Haydn and Lei-Leung at Colorado's Aspen Festival.

Amid the symphonies around it in Beethoven's canon, his Eighth may look small and insubstantial. But the composer himself was very fond of it. We'll go to Los Angeles to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen lead the L.A. Philharmonic in concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Not everyone likes conductor Sir Roger Norrington's preference to have no vibrato in the strings for any piece written before 1930. But it brings an interesting character to the Haydn Cello Concerto that Jean-Guihen Queyras played a couple of weeks ago at London's BBC Proms with Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony.

Richard Strauss' tone poem, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," is legendary for the compelling opening that graced the soundtrack of "2001: A Space Odyssey." But it's over 30 minutes of magnificent music, which we'll hear performed at Switzerland's Lucerne Festival by Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony.

Last week, conductor Mark Elder and England's Halle Orchestra performed a very well-received BBC Proms concert at London's Royal Albert Hall. We'll take you there to hear a performance of George Butterworth's moving rhapsody, "A Shropshire Lad," and violinist Janine Jansen playing Max Bruch's First Violin Concerto.

By Leonard Slatkin's count, there are over 80 different orchestrations of Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." He tapped into 15 of them to create a unique version of the work. He leads the Nashville Symphony in a performance of it at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville.

We'll have a show full of fresh performances from festivals like London's BBC Proms and Colorado's Strings. But the newest of all is from Wednesday's Mostly Mozart Festival concert in New York City. That's where Louis Langree led the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in an exciting performance of Mozart's 40th Symphony.