Performance Today®

Kirill Gerstein is the most recent winner of the Gilmore Artist Award, the most lucrative award for classical pianists. Handed out once every four years, it comes with a $300,000 prize. Perhaps a bit surprising for someone who started out as a jazz pianist. In today's show, Gerstein talks about how he decided to focus on classical music, and admits that he still wonders if he did the right thing in giving up jazz. Gerstein plays Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto in San Francisco.

Mozart hadn't quite arrived when he wrote his Symphony Number 34. He was still living in his home town of Salzburg, where he felt constrained and unappreciated. Franz Schubert's 9th Symphony was grander and more complex than anything he had written so far. So grand that they call it his Great Symphony now. So complex that no one could play it. In today's show, these two great symphonies, by frustrated young composers. From concerts by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.

Their names come from Roman mythology. The ancients called them wandering stars, and assigned each its own personality. One is the bringer of war, while another brings peace. One is jolly and benevolent. Its neighbor is remote and mystical. Gustav Holst poured his passion for astrology into his greatest work, his orchestral suite called "The Planets." We'll hear a performance by Peter Oundjian and the Toronto Symphony.

In this weekend's show, two of the greatest pianists around: Yefim Bronfman and Emanuel Ax. Bronfman plays Shostakovich in London, and Ax (pictured) plays Mozart in Berlin. Plus, Bruce Adolphe drops by for this week's Piano Puzzler.

Zoe Keating is a classically-trained cellist. But she uses more than a cello and a bow to make music. She also uses a computer and a set of foot pedals to create musical loops and layers, improvising and recording on the fly. She recently joined host Fred Child in the PT studios for conversation and her unique brand of avant cello music. We'll hear her arrangement of the slow movement from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

The term "Little Russia" sounds innocuous to our ears, even charming. But say those words to a Ukrainian, and you might just wind up with a black eye. "Little Russian" is a demeaning term for all things Ukrainian. It's also the nickname of Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony. A critic gave it the label, because it's infused with Ukrainian folk melodies. We'll hear a performance by the Sydney Symphony and conductor Hans Graf.

Alexander Borodin was a professional chemist, with little time to compose. Usually, he took forever to finish a piece of music. But one summer, he took some time off work and wrote a string quartet. The Jerusalem String Quartet plays Borodin's String Quartet No. 2, in concert in New York City. And Yefim Bronfman (pictured) plays Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, from a concert in London. Shostakovich wrote it in honor of his son Maxim's 19th birthday.

They're two works that were almost lost forever. Georges Bizet's Symphony in C sat on a shelf at the Paris Conservatory library for 60 years, a long-forgotten homework assignment by the 17-year-old composer. A researcher discovered it in 1933, dusted it off and got it published. And Anton Webern's lovely "In the Summer Breeze" spent some time in a hole in the ground, hidden by Webern himself as Russian troops marched into Vienna in 1945. We'll hear both, from concerts in Switzerland and New York.

It's not that Gustav Mahler found his visit to Niagara Falls uninspiring. Far from it - he thought it was spectacular. It's just that, when he and his wife visited there in 1910, there was something bigger on his mind, something he thought was even more impressive. It was the piece he was to conduct that night in nearby Buffalo, the Symphony No. 6 by Beethoven. We'll hear the piece that outshines Niagara Falls, in a concert by the Buffalo Philharmonic.