American Public Media’s Performance Today® is America’s most popular classical music radio program and a winner of the 2014 Gabriel Award for artistic achievement. The show is broadcast on hundreds of public radio stations across the country, including at 1 p.m. central weekdays on Minnesota Public Radio. More information about our stations can be found at APM Distribution.
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.
Composer Bruce Adolphe joins us weekly 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.
Concertos require great main character energy. On today's show, we'll travel to Shanghai to hear a bassoon concerto that expects its soloist to be sweet, agile, mysterious, and a little bit sassy: the Bassoon Concerto by Czech composer Jiří Pauer.
American composer Julia Perry wrote well over a hundred pieces of music, but just a handful are published. Why is that the case? We've got the story and an all-too-rare highlight from Perry's available music on this episode of Performance Today.
