Performance Today®

Every week, composer Bruce Adolphe joins us for a musical game, our Piano Puzzler. Bruce re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a great composer. 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 this episode of Performance Today.

The city of Olinda, Brazil, is famous for massive papier-mâché puppets during the annual Carnival parades. Those “bonecos,” as they're called, can be 20 feet tall. Composer Clarice Assad wrote a piece inspired by Carnival and those big puppets. Join us today to hear “Bonecos de Olinda” by Clarice Assad.

Gloria Chien and Anthony McGill are both as busy as can be; Chien runs three festivals, and McGill is the principal clarinet in the New York Philharmonic. But they still make time to play as a duet. On today’s show, Gloria Chien and Anthony McGill play from the Grand Duo Concertant by Carl Maria von Weber.

The Ekstasis Duo loves to play the "secret jewels," lesser-known works they feel deserve to be heard. Today we'll hear them play a work that was lost for nearly a century: Three Pieces by Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinksy.

Pianist Inna Faliks recently asked a few composers to write responses to the music she loves. Joins us today to hear Faliks play the piece composer Billy Childs wrote in response to the technically demanding Scarbo from Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.

Ruth Reinhardt is a powerhouse among up-and-coming conductors. This season, she's making her first appearance with fifteen different orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Nashville Symphony, and the Warsaw Philharmonic, to name a few. On today's show, Ruth Reinhardt leads the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic in a performance of Samuel Coleridge Taylor's Ballade for Orchestra.

Jeannette Sorrell founded the early music group Apollo's Fire back in 1992. Thirty-one years and counting, that fire is still burning hot. We'll hear Apollo's Fire at a concert in Cleveland. Plus, Bruce Adolphe has this week's Piano Puzzler.

In 2014, Andrew Norman composed a piece based on an exploration of two of Johannes Brahms's melodic motifs. The Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned the work as part of a project that invited young composers to write companion pieces for some of Brahms's best-known pieces. Join us today to hear Suspend by Andrew Norman.

In 1940, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote a piece that fulfilled a wish for his friends as well as a wish of his own, and the result was a huge success. Join us to hear the story and the music: the Piano Quintet by Dmitri Shostakovich.