Performance

Nominations for the 2023 Classical Woman of the Year, awarded by Performance Today, are now closed. This year’s honoree will be announced March 31.

Franz Schubert was shorter than most people, a little self-conscious, and socially awkward. His friends affectionately called him "Schwammerl," the little mushroom. Schubert shared himself with his friends through music that many of us still treasure two centuries later. On today’s show, we’ll hear pianist Orli Shaham play a sonata by Schubert at the Kaufman Music Center in New York City.

On today's show, we'll introduce you to cellist Leland Ko in our latest installment of the 2023 PT Young Artists in Residence series. Leland and pianist Adria Ye join Fred Child for music and conversation at our studio in St. Paul.

We're proud to introduce you to our next 2022-2023 PT Young Artist in Residence: Cellist Leland Ko. Ko recently joined Fred Child at the Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser Recording Studio in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hear the conversation and music right here!

Every week, composer Bruce Adolphe joins us for a musical game, our Piano Puzzler. Bruce re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a great composer. We get one of our listeners on the phone who tries to guess the hidden tune and the composer whose style Bruce is imitating. Play along with the PT Piano Puzzler on this episode of Performance Today.

The city of Olinda, Brazil, is famous for massive papier-mâché puppets during the annual Carnival parades. Those “bonecos,” as they're called, can be 20 feet tall. Composer Clarice Assad wrote a piece inspired by Carnival and those big puppets. Join us today to hear “Bonecos de Olinda” by Clarice Assad.

Gloria Chien and Anthony McGill are both as busy as can be; Chien runs three festivals, and McGill is the principal clarinet in the New York Philharmonic. But they still make time to play as a duet. On today’s show, Gloria Chien and Anthony McGill play from the Grand Duo Concertant by Carl Maria von Weber.

The Ekstasis Duo loves to play the "secret jewels," lesser-known works they feel deserve to be heard. Today we'll hear them play a work that was lost for nearly a century: Three Pieces by Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinksy.

Pianist Inna Faliks recently asked a few composers to write responses to the music she loves. Joins us today to hear Faliks play the piece composer Billy Childs wrote in response to the technically demanding Scarbo from Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.

Ruth Reinhardt is a powerhouse among up-and-coming conductors. This season, she's making her first appearance with fifteen different orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Nashville Symphony, and the Warsaw Philharmonic, to name a few. On today's show, Ruth Reinhardt leads the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic in a performance of Samuel Coleridge Taylor's Ballade for Orchestra.