Performance Today®

Growing up, Jamie Bernstein says her father was relentlessly competitive and preternaturally good at everything. Well, almost everything. In this interview highlight, she describes the glee she and her siblings felt when they found one thing their father wasn't good at. Jamie Bernstein's new memoir is called Famous Father Girl.

It sounds like the set-up for a great punch line. Three composers walk into a restaurant: Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Michael Tilson Thomas. The first course is challenging musical trivia. The next course involves clanging spoons and glasses. Michael Tilson Thomas describes a memorable dinner with two other American composers.

On Thursday's Performance Today, Michael Tilson Thomas reflects back to a humorous evening with Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and the spirit of Igor Stravinsky. Then hear Leonard Bernstein conduct the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite.

Tania Leon is a Cuban-born composer, conductor and a Distinguished Professor of Music at the City University of New York. On Wednesday's Performance Today, Tania Leon tells us about meeting Leonard Bernstein, that "...(it) was like meeting a mythological figure."

Sure, the song 'Maria' from Leonard Bernstein's musical 'West Side Story' is lovely. For composer and conductor Tania Leon, it meant so much more. 'Maria' set in motion her dream of a possible life in America. Leon remembers her mentor, friend, salsa dancer and Spanish-speaker Leonard Bernstein.

When composer Bright Sheng met Leonard Bernstein, he wowed the maestro with his talent. Not musical talent at first, but his skills in the kitchen. Bright Sheng and Leonard Bernstein...and Peking duck, on Tuesday's Performance Today.

When Bright Sheng went to the Tanglewood Summer Music Festival as a young composer, he didn't think his Peking Duck would lead to a meeting with Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein left impressed by the music and thrilled by Sheng's cooking. Those minutes in the kitchen made Sheng "Tanglewood famous," he says, and was the beginning of a long working relationship with Bernstein.

After fighting in the Austrian army during the first World War, composer and violinist Fritz Kreisler moved to the US, where, initially, he didn't receive a warm welcome. Kreisler missed his home in Vienna, and he wrote that sense of longing into music. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear his String Quartet in A minor, from a live performance recorded at the Music@Menlo festival.

Leonard Bernstein's love of word play and competitive drive was notorious. Whether it was anagrams or mental jotto, Bernstein's former assistant Charlie Harmon says there were few who could beat him. And if you did, his daughter Jamie Bernstein said, you might wish you hadn't.