Performance Today®

23-year-old Canadian pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko is having a breakthrough year | over the past six months, he's won five gold medals at international piano competitions. On this edition of Performance Today, we'll hear from his gold-medal-winning performance in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

The Acana tree can grow up to 90 feet, standing tall over wide-spreading roots. Its remarkably strong wood is essential to Cuban life and society. On today's show, hear music inspired by this majestic tree: Acana by the 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León.

Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York, is a magical place for composer Wang Jie. She says she feels transported by the warm orange glow of the hall, and she wrote a piece for the Buffalo Philharmonic to play in that space. Join us today to hear the world premiere of The Winter that United Us by Wang Jie.

Join us for a wildly creative new version of the Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens, featuring the Anderson and Roe Piano Duo (and friends) from a concert at the Grand Teton Music Festival.

The Acana tree can grow up to 90 feet, standing tall over wide-spreading roots. Its remarkably strong wood is essential to Cuban life and society. On today's show, hear music inspired by this majestic tree: Acana by the 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León.

It goes around and around: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff, and the cycle repeats. So, would music inspired by the ecological water cycle also have no beginning or end? We'll find out with music by Libby Larsen on this edition of Performance Today.

Toby Appel is one of the top viola players around, and he’s also an excellent chef. Appel spent several years running a restaurant in Santa Fe, and, for a year, he was the personal chef for the artist Georgia O'Keeffe.  Join us today to hear chef Toby Appel and friends play the Phantasy Quintet by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

It's an incredibly romantic and real story: a husband wrote a piece for his wife to honor their newborn boy. He secretly hired musicians to play it outside her bedroom door on the morning of her birthday (which also happened to be Christmas). Join us to hear that piece, the Siegfried Idyll by Richard Wagner, on this edition of Performance Today.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a fine marksman, a fencer, and one of the great French violinists of the 1700s. He was also the first known classical composer of African descent. The Minnesota Orchestra plays Joseph Boulogne's Symphony No. 1 on this episode of Performance Today.