Performance Today®

Every time pianist Robert Levin plays a concerto by Mozart or Beethoven, he improvises the cadenzas. And even improvises along with the orchestra during their passages. He says Mozart and Beethoven would have done the same, and argues that you MUST improvise in these works to be in the true spirit of the music. Levin joins host Fred Child for some lively conversation and demonstration (improvising three wildly different versions of the same Beethoven cadenza), and we'll hear him improvise his way through Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in concert in Copenhagen.

It used to be that all classical musicians could improvise. That was just part of the job. Over the years, it's become something of a lost art among performers. With one notable exception. The tradition of improvisation has never died out among organists. Why? Michael Barone, host of "Pipedreams," and organist Cameron Carpenter both comment on that question. Carpenter also demonstrates his improvisational skill in concert. Join us as we continue our look at improvisation in classical music.

Point/counterpoint: Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg says you don't have to change the notes to improvise -- interpretation is a form of improv. Pianist Robert Levin disagrees. We'll consider the question by comparing VERY different versions of the Bach Goldberg Variations: Glenn Gould vs. Simone Dinnerstein. AND... some composers have written pieces intended to sound like improv, but... you have to play the notes they wrote. Schubert "Impromptus," and Poulenc "Improvisations."

A pianist who can't HELP improvising: Gabriela Montero in the PT studios. She takes a call from a PT listener, who sings a tune. Montero improvises around it on the spot. Plus, we'll have an interview with pianist Lang Lang from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

We're going to spend part of each day this week exploring improvisation in classical music. It used to be a vital part of every musician's skill set. What changed and why? We'll have conversations with a pair of experts on baroque improvisation - guitarist Rolf Lislevand and recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute - and listen to them play music of Vivaldi and Johann Kapsberger.

Join us for an interview with the Ying Quartet from this summer's Aspen Music Festival. They'll play music of Mendelssohn, and also Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-Chung.

In honor of the opening of the Olympics in Beijing, we'll present music of Chinese and Chinese-American composers and performers. Among them is pianist Lang Lang, who plays five Chinese songs in Fort Worth. And the Ying Quartet will talk about and play music of Haydn and Lei-Leung at Colorado's Aspen Festival.

Amid the symphonies around it in Beethoven's canon, his Eighth may look small and insubstantial. But the composer himself was very fond of it. We'll go to Los Angeles to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen lead the L.A. Philharmonic in concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Not everyone likes conductor Sir Roger Norrington's preference to have no vibrato in the strings for any piece written before 1930. But it brings an interesting character to the Haydn Cello Concerto that Jean-Guihen Queyras played a couple of weeks ago at London's BBC Proms with Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony.

Richard Strauss' tone poem, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," is legendary for the compelling opening that graced the soundtrack of "2001: A Space Odyssey." But it's over 30 minutes of magnificent music, which we'll hear performed at Switzerland's Lucerne Festival by Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony.