Performance Today®

The symphonies of Shostakovich are powerful musical testaments to a creative life lived under the burden of an oppressive government. And a deep understanding of that comes through in this exceptionally powerful performance of the third and fourth movements. Conductor Yuri Temirkanov leads the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra in concert in Birmingham, England.

Renowned English pianist Imogen Cooper is known for her brilliance with the music of Mozart and Schubert. Now, after four decades on the concert stage, she's performing Bach for the first time. She stopped by our St. Paul studios earlier this week to talk about this new adventure, and to play a Bach partita.

Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performs works both intimate and expansive on today's "Performance Today." From West Palm Beach, Florida, he'll offer a pair of etudes by Chopin. And we'll follow him to Geneva, Switzerland, where he plays Camille Saint-Saens'"Egyptian" Concerto with Bertrand de Billy and the Orchestra of the Suisse Romande.

Renowned English pianist Imogen Cooper is known for her brilliance with the music of Mozart and Schubert. Now, after four decades on the concert stage, she's performing Bach for the first time. She stopped by our St. Paul studios earlier this week to talk about this new adventure, and to play a Bach partita.

We'll travel to Coral Gables, Florida, to hear music from the Spanish baroque performed by violinist Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI. And Kristian Bezuidenhout will sit down at the harpsichord and offer a Toccata by Johann Froberger.

Critics have been raving about the Minnesota Orchestra's recordings of the Beethoven symphonies. Find out what's so special about conductor Osmo Vanska's take on Beethoven when they perform the Second Symphony at a concert in Minneapolis.

New Year's Eve is a big deal in Berlin. An estimated million people converge upon the center of the city every year for a celebration. And you can feel that sense of excitement in a New Year's Eve performance of Modest Mussorgsky's masterpiece by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. Even if you've heard this piece many times before, we think that you'll find this a particularly thrilling interpretation.

Since their Proms debut in London last summer, Gustavo Dudamel and Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra have been the talk of the classical music world. There's so much fire, technical skill and interpretive flair in their performances that it's hard to believe that they're a youth orchestra. Hear what the buzz is about when they perform one of Beethoven's most emotion-packed symphonies in Boston.

On Tuesday, the orchestra performed an historic concert in Pyongyang, North Korea, becoming part of the largest American delegation to visit that country since the early 1950's. We'll have excerpts from that concert, including Lorin Maazel conducting Gershwin's "An American in Paris." And we'll talk with WNYC's John Schaefer, who was at the concert.

Clara Schumann refused to publish her husband Robert's one and only violin concerto because she thought it was the music of a mad man. Just a year after he wrote it, Schumann was institutionalized in a sanitarium. But violinist Renaud Capucon hears great pain, beauty and triumph in the music. He'll talk about this lonely concerto before we hear him perform it in Berlin with Hans Graf and the German Symphony Orchestra, as our week of violin concertos continues.