Performance Today®

Every week, composer Bruce Adolphe joins us for a musical game: the Piano Puzzler. Bruce re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a great composer, and we get one of our listeners on the phone who tries to guess the hidden tune and the composer whose style Bruce is imitating. Play along with the PT Piano Puzzler on today’s show.

We'll reintroduce you to saxophonist Salvador Flores, one of our 2023 PT Young Artists in Residence, on today's show. Salvador joins Fred Child for music and conversation at our studio in St. Paul.

In Ukrainian, the word "dumka" means "thought." And in music, a dumka is a somewhat dreamlike dance that often comes back to a bittersweet reflection on the sadness of life. We'll hear a dumka by Rebecca Clarke on today's show from a performance at the Geneva Music Festival in Geneva, New York.

If you were to choose one piece of classical music to share with someone to get them hooked, what would it be? Pianist Yefim Bronfman has an opinion on the matter...and we'll hear him play it on today's show. Plus, Bruce Adolphe has this week’s Piano Puzzler!

The Chinese lute, or pipa, has been around for more than two thousand years. On today's show, we'll hear a 21st-century composition for pipa performed by Wu Man and the Lexington Symphony at a concert in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a young unknown when he met his hero, composer Peter Tchaikovsky, who died only a month later. The very night Rachmaninoff got the news, he began writing a piece in honor of Tchaikovsky. On today's show, we'll hear members of the Seattle Chamber Music Society play the Trio élégiaque No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

If you were to choose one piece of classical music to share with someone to get them hooked, what would it be? Pianist Yefim Bronfman has an opinion on the matter...and we'll hear him play it on today's show.

Composer Brian Nabors feels as though the universe is connected through a unified pulse. In 2019, he composed a piece with examples of that unwavering pulse set in different life scenarios, and it's up to you to decide for yourself what those settings are. On today's show, we'll hear Pulse by Brian Nabors from a concert presented by the National Philharmonic Institute and Festival.

It's a portrait painted with music, an incredibly colorful and inventive picture of the sea: La Mer by Claude Debussy. On today's episode, we'll hear a chamber orchestra performance of La Mer at a concert presented by ROCO in Houston, Texas.