Performance Today®

We'll go to Oslo, Norway, to hear Gerhard Oppitz perform music from Brahms' Second Piano Concerto with conductor Marek Janowski and the Oslo Philharmonic. Then Mitsuko Uchida will talk about Mozart's 19th Piano Concerto before serving as both soloist and conductor for a performance with the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall.

One of the world's great orchestras offers a fascinating interpretation of Beethoven's penultimate symphony. Mariss Jansons leads the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in concert at their home hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

When Moliere's comedy, "The Bourgeois Gentleman," premiered in 1670, Jean-Baptiste Lully not only wrote the music... he acted in it, too. Almost two-and-a-half centuries later, Lully pulled another cameo when some of his themes for that production showed up in a suite by Richard Strauss inspired by the same play. We'll head to Hanover, Germany, to hear Eiji Oue conduct the North German Radio Philharmonic.

You most often find flutist Emmanuel Pahud in front of an orchestra... or leading the flute section of the Berlin Philharmonic. Pianist Yefim Bronfman is usually performing a concerto with an orchestra or playing a solo recital in one of the world's great concert halls. Today, they team up to play an intimate and involving Brahms sonata at Boston's Jordan Hall.

We're broadcasting from Los Angeles today, kicking off a week that will feature a performance a day by the L.A. Philharmonic, as well as conversations with music director Esa-Pekka Salonen and some of the orchestra's musicians. Today, Salonen leads them in Haydn's "Bear" Symphony and a piece by Alexander Mossolov at Disney Hall.

Bartok's Second Violin Concerto - a monumental, yet relatively unknown work - was written for the Hungarian virtuoso Zoltan Szekely, in 1936. But it's been gaining favor as one of the newest mountains to climb for today's soloists, including Leila Josefowicz. This past weekend she played it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Gustavo Dudamel conducting. That performance from Walt Disney Concert Hall is featured on today's Performance Today.

Paul Galbraith plays his classical guitar in an unusual manner - more in the position of a cello than a guitar - and what he creates is some marvelous music. He drops by our Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser Studio in St. Paul for the first half of a two-part conversation that features music by Mozart, Lennox Berkeley and Bach.

Dmitri Shostakovich thought Robert Schumann's lone cello concerto to be a bit rough around the edges. So he cleaned it up with a new arrangement. We'll hear it performed by cellist Alexander Ivashkin at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He's joined by conductor Alexander Lazarev and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.

We're broadcasting from Los Angeles today. And this week's "Performance Today" will feature several performances by the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Hall. Today, Paavo Jarvi leads the orchestra in the final three movements of Sergei Rachmaninoff's very dramatic Symphony No. 2.