Performance Today®

It's Christmas Eve, and there's a big party. Young Clara gets a special present, a nutcracker. At midnight, the Christmas tree grows magically, and the Nutcracker springs to life, doing battle with an army of mice. It's Act One of "The Nutcracker," by Peter Tchaikovsky. Conductor Simon Rattle says that the more he listened to Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, the more fascinated he became by it. Today, Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic perform Act One of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker." And they'll be back on Monday's show for Act Two.

When it came to writing symphonies, Johannes Brahms entered the game relatively late. He was in his forties when he finished his first one, having labored over it for almost 15 years. The second was a much easier birth. He wrote it over the course of one glorious summer in southern Austria. Brahms joked that it was a region where "the melodies were so abundant, one had to be careful not to step on them." Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony take care with Brahms' lovely melodies, in a performance from San Francisco's Davies Hall.

In 1917, British composer Arnold Bax went to see the ruins of an ancient castle, where legend says King Arthur was born. Bax was inspired to write a symphonic poem about it. The result is called "Tintagel," named for that mysterious castle in Cornwall. Thomas Dausgaard leads the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, from a concert at the Concertgebouw. And Bruce Adolphe stops by for this week's Piano Puzzler.

Music teachers might be horrified at this idea, but one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era was almost completely self-taught. Georg Philipp Telemann had a total of about two weeks of lessons when he was a teenager. After that, he was on his own. We'll hear one of Telemann's orchestral suites, where he imagined what music from far-off places would sound like. Places like Turkey, Moscow, Switzerland, and Portugal. Plus, a Russian and a German imagine music from Spain and come up with the same title: two Spanish Caprices, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Moritz Moszkowski.

Claude Debussy once tried his hand at painting, but decided music had a much better way of depicting the glint of sunlight on water, the ever-changing undulations of the sea, and the smell of a salty mist shimmering in the air. In today's show, Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the New York Philharmonic in Debussy's masterpiece for the senses, "La Mer," or "The Sea."

Conductor Roger Norrington remembers one early-morning rehearsal with New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's. Given the hour, he had encouraged the musicians to take it easy. Instead, Norrington says, they "went off like maniacs. I just had to keep up." In today's show, Roger Norrington and the "maniacs" of the OSL, with their high-powered work ethic, perform Haydn's Symphony Number 99 at Carnegie Hall.

When Beethoven wrote his Triple Concerto in 1803, he pointed out to his publisher that the piece was unique. That was more than 200 years ago -- it's still (nearly!) unique today: a piece for *three* soloists and orchestra. We'll hear it from a special concert this year in Hamburg. Alan Gilbert conducting the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Veronika Eberle, and cellist Gustav Ravinius. And this week's 21st century work is a neo-Romantic symphonic poem by Canadian composer Allan Gilliland: "Shadows and Light."

Conductor Roger Norrington remembers one early-morning rehearsal with New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's. Given the hour, he had encouraged the musicians to take it easy. Instead, Norrington says, they "went off like maniacs. I just had to keep up." In today's show, Roger Norrington and the "maniacs" of the OSL, with their high-powered work ethic, perform Haydn's Symphony Number 99 at Carnegie Hall.

If you think musical chaos began in the 20th century, you'll have to adjust your calendar by about 200 years. When Jean-Fery Rebel was writing a ballet about the creation of the world in 1738, he threw caution to the wind, and threw every note in the scale into one crashing, grinding, tooth-rattling opening chord. It's utter chaos, like the world he was trying to depict. Happily, the music quickly evolves into a set of charming dances. We'll hear a performance of music two centuries ahead of its time, by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.