Performance Today®

Every summer, something strange and magical happens at Marlboro Music in Vermont. Festival co-director Mitsuko Uchida says, "Time passes very slowly in Marlboro, and at the same time very fast. You blink, and seven weeks are gone. But it seems as if you had eternity in your hands." In today's show, highlights from one of Mitsuko Uchida's Marlboro performances, teaming up with two young string players for a Schubert Adagio.

Most classical music concerts take place inside the concert hall, essentially a glorified box. Many of those boxes are rightly revered and cherished for their history, architecture, and acoustics. But today, we'll go outside the box. Today's show features performances from unusual locations, including a barge, a night club, and a decommissioned power plant.

Every summer, an amazing musical gathering takes place in Vermont. Christopher Serkin, board member of Marlboro Music, sums it up this way. He says, "It's like summer camp, but for geniuses." Serkin's grandfather, pianist Rudolf Serkin, founded Marlboro in 1951. Every summer since then, young professionals and seasoned music veterans have gathered for seven weeks of glorious music-making. We'll have highlights from Marlboro all week, including a Shostakovich Piano Trio in today's show.

Every summer in London, the world's biggest summer music festival, the BBC Proms, gets underway. It features eight weeks of daily concerts with some of the biggest names in classical music. This year for the first time, PT is streaming every single Proms concert live on the PT home page, www.performancetoday.org. And we'll be featuring highlights from many of the performances in the show. Coming up today, highlights from opening night at the Proms, two weeks ago in London.

Every summer in London, the world's biggest summer music festival, the BBC Proms, gets underway. It features eight weeks of daily concerts with some of the biggest names in classical music. This year for the first time, PT is streaming every single Proms concert live on the PT home page, www.performancetoday.org. And we'll be featuring highlights from many of the performances in the show. Coming up today, highlights from opening night at the Proms, two weeks ago in London.

In today's show, a performance of a Haydn symphony that had a Viennese audience laughing out loud. We'll let you in on the joke, as Daniel Barenboim conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Haydn's Farewell symphony. Plus, pianist Yuja Wang delivers a jaw-dropping performance of music from Stravinsky's ballet "Petrushka" in St. Paul.

Gustav Mahler's massive Fifth Symphony rages on for over an hour. But in the middle of that storm, there's a 10-minute oasis of calm. The Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth has been used for everything from funerals for heads of state to Olympic skating routines. Most people hear it as an outpouring of grief, but some say there's much more to it than that. In today's show, the story behind Mahler's Adagietto and a performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

The piano is essentially a percussion instrument. You press a key, a hammer hits the corresponding string, and a note is produced. But is that all there is? There must be more to playing the piano than that. Today, we'll hear from two terrific pianists, Shai Wosner and Garrick Ohlsson. Ohlsson weighs in on the difficulties of the piano, calling it "a box full of diminuendos." But with Ohlsson and Wosner in the driver's seat, we prefer to think of it as a box full of exquisite possibilities.

If only we could hand out those scratch-n-sniff cards to PT listeners today. It might come close to approximating what Manuel de Falla had in mind when he wrote his "Nights in the Gardens of Spain." He meant his music to evoke not just the sights and sounds of the gardens surrounding the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. He wanted to conjure up the delicate fragrances of the place that's been called "Paradise on Earth." If you can, find a quiet garden spot, lean back, close your eyes, and inhale de Falla's gorgeous music.