Performance Today Features

How do young pianists prepare for one of the most prestigious and most grueling music competitions in the world? Find out in a new podcast, sponsored by Performance Today.

A narrated song cycle tells the life story of Bayard Rustin: musician, activist, and architect of the 1963 March on Washington.

Clarinetist Anthony McGill is playing a new concerto where his instrument's part is inspired by the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in an iconic speech.

Christopher Tignor is a composer, violinist, and software engineer. His emotionally charged scores and unique focus on live, performance-based electro-acoustic practice has won acclaim within both the classical and experimental communities.

Listen to a never-before-broadcast show theme song from the 1986 pilot episode of the program. Fred Child also interviews the show's first executive producer, Wes Horner, and Jim Pugh, composer of the Performance Today theme song.

Anthony McGill is principal clarinet with the New York Philharmonic. In this special online-only Puzzler, he joins Fred and Bruce Adolphe in the studio to take a crack at our weekly musical game.

Composer Justin Hurwitz talks about creating the themes that give the film La La Land an emotional, musical soul.

Listeners and radio hosts share stories about their favorite Christmas and winter songs.

From a young age, Sam Shepherd has rejected the idea of neat, tidy musical categories. He studied classical piano growing up, but felt confined by what he calls the "dots on a page." It wasn't until he heard a performer really making a classical piece his own, breaking out of strictly classical feel, that he was hooked. Now, Shepherd writes music under the alias "Floating Points."

Listen to the brass quartet The Westerlies perform original compositions from their album live in our studio.