Performance Today®

When he was 20 years old, American composer Aaron Copland went to Paris; that was where all the exciting new music was happening. He wanted to find a teacher, and he found someone he thought was tremendously inspiring: Nadia Boulanger. Coming up on Thursday's Performance Today, we'll hear from an amazing 1980 interview in which Copland recounts how he found his great teacher. And we'll hear his Clarinet Concerto, from a concert at the Windham Music Festival in upstate New York.

Fritz Kreisler is famous as a 20th century violinist and composer. It's not so well known that when war broke out in 1914, Kreisler volunteered to serve in the Austrian Army and he spent four weeks in the trenches on the Eastern Front. We'll hear the story of Fritz Kreisler's narrow escape from the trenches and a piece he wrote a few years later; his String Quartet in a minor. Plus, news from the Minnesota Orchestra, on Wednesday's Performance Today.

When Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz was called for a meeting with Dan Gustin, Director of the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, he had no idea the news he was about to receive: that he had been selected as the winner of the 2014 Gilmore Artist Award! Coming up on Tuesday's Performance Today, music and conversation with 2014 Gilmore Artist Rafal Blechacz, from a special event last week in New York.

Giuseppe Tartini was seeking refuge in a monastery when he had a vivid dream. In his dream the Devil appeared at the foot of his bed and played a beguiling little melody, which stuck with Tartini for the rest of his life. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear that mesmerizing tune performed by Michala Petri and Anthony Newman in concert at the 92nd Street Y.

On this weekend's Performance Today, husband and wife duo Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky share a piano to play Schubert's Andantino Varie. It's lovely music, played with love. Plus, Weiss and Polonsky will tell us what it's like to be a musical couple and the story of how they got together.

For many years Performance Today has invited promising young musicians to our studio as Young Artists in Residence. On Friday's Performance Today we'll check in with two of our Young Artist in Residence alumni, including world-class guitarist Jason Vieaux.

Felix Mendelssohn has a reputation as a composer who had wonderful facility, but not necessarily mastery. On Thursday's Performance Today we'll hear music that challenges that reputation of faint praise; Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in C minor.

The 2014 Gilmore Artist Award goes to 28-year-old Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz.

The final section of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 has been a conductor's conundrum since it premiered in 1937. Do you play it fast and loud as a life-affirming statement for a downtrodden people, or do you play it slower to emphasize the irony of people rejoicing through tears? On Wednesday's Performance Today we'll hear this ambiguous piece performed by the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic.