Performance Today®

Listen to the young British ensemble sing music from the 1500s.

The Budapest String Quartet was founded, logically, in the city of Budapest. The Cleveland Quartet made their home in, you guessed it, Cleveland, Ohio. But the Tokyo Quartet has never been based in Tokyo. Four bright young music students from Tokyo each moved to the United States to study, met in New York City and in 1969 formed a string quartet. The Tokyo Quartet has been a major force in the world of classical music for 44 years, but this season is their last. On Tuesday's Performance Today we'll hear a performance by the Tokyo Quartet as they celebrate their farewell tour.

1924 was a landmark year for American music. It was the year of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue first made audiences swoon. George Antheil was another American composer who loved jazz. He liked the idea of Rhapsody in Blue, but he thought Gershwin's piece missed the gritty down-and-dirty heart of jazz and blues. On Monday's Performance Today we'll hear George Antheil's answer to Rhapsody in Blue, but with a little more gravel in it: Antheil's Jazz Symphony from 1925.

Conductor, pianist and candid commentator Bill Eddins joins host Fred Child in the studio to take listeners on a tour of his favorite pieces of classical music. He talks about the unappreciated humor in Beethoven's symphonies, the sly keyboard prowess of Alicia de Larrocha, and Eddins reveals what he calls "the sexiest piece of classical music ever written." Find out the answer and get the conductor's take on classical music on Friday's Performance Today.

Conductor, pianist and candid commentator Bill Eddins joins host Fred Child in the studio to take listeners on a tour of his favorite pieces of classical music. He talks about the unappreciated humor in Beethoven's symphonies, the sly keyboard prowess of Alicia de Larrocha, and Eddins reveals what he calls "the sexiest piece of classical music ever written." Find out the answer and get the conductor's take on classical music on Friday's Performance Today.

It might seem to be an unlikely partnership: classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and singer-songwriter Tift Merritt. On the surface their musical worlds sound very different, but Dinnerstein says when you strip away the details like genre, and instrument and even notation, at the core "what we have in common has to do with emotion and color." On Thursday's Performance Today, Simone Dinnerstein and Tift Merritt discuss finding each other and on finding common musical ground. They'll also play music from their new CD collaboration called "Night."

The long wait is over... in St. Paul, at least. While their colleagues across the Mississippi River at the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis are still locked in a contract dispute, for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra the six month work stoppage is over. The ensemble will return to the concert stage next week. On Wednesday's Performance Today, we'll sample the sound of the SPCO in concert with Hans Graf conducting the Mother Goose Suite by Maurice Ravel.

On Tuesday's PT we'll feature two venerable pianists in concert playing a pair of masterpieces. We'll hear Martha Argerich in concert in Switzerland, playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2. And Maurizio Pollini in concert in Vienna, playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12, with the Vienna Philharmonic.

For the last 18 years of his life, Russian composer Alexander Borodin struggled to write an opera called "Prince Igor." He had a good excuse for his slow progress: he had a day job as a chemist. He only had time to compose on the weekends. Borodin's friends were so frustrated that he couldn't finish his opera, they even offered to help. In the end, Borodin died without finishing Prince Igor. His friends believed in the opera so much, they filled in the missing pieces. On Monday's Performance Today we'll hear one of the sections that Borodin did finish from a concert by the Nashville Symphony.