Playing by ear

‘Performance Today’ has selected performer and composer Jessie Montgomery as the 2025 Classical Woman of the Year. This annual award recognizes women who have made significant contributions to the classical music art form and have inspired our listeners. Find out more!

For composer Kevin Puts, the key of C major is a sonic representation of "home." It's familiar and comforting. In 2019, Puts wrote a string quartet that begins in that familiar key, but the music soon moves into what Puts calls "the search for new and unfamiliar harmonic terrain." He wanted the music to explore the sonic possibilities, but then return to his musical idea of home. Puts knew that, however he got there, the feeling of home would be changed by the journey. Join us today to hear the Miro Quartet play Home by Kevin Puts.

Today, we're featuring the world premiere of a new suite by Hanna Helgegren. Inspired by the quiet magic of the forests and bogs near her home in rural Sweden, the work pays tribute to the natural world. On today's show, we'll hear the Camerata Nordica Octet perform Helgegren’s "The Nordic Seasons."

Composer Jimmy Lopez says the pulse of techno music is instantly recognizable in any dance hall or club around the world —a steady, thumping rhythm that you feel in your body. Tune in today to hear the thrilling power of techno combined with world music: Fiesta! by Jimmy Lopez.

In the spring of 1968, the late conductor Paul Freeman ran into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Atlanta airport. Their brief conversation was one he never forgot. On this episode of Performance Today, hear about that life-changing encounter in our musical celebration of King's life and legacy.

Gabriela Ortiz's vibrant orchestral work 'Kauyumari' is named after the spiritual guide of Mexico's Huichol people. The piece uses a recurring folk melody to evoke healing and ecstasy. Today, we’ll take you to a concert in Turin, Italy, to hear how Ortiz transforms traditional sounds into a joyful journey through what she calls the "invisible realm."

In 2015, English composer Anna Clyne wrote an orchestral piece inspired by the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Charles Baudelaire, evoking a world of "melancholy waltz and languid vertigo." Join us today for a sonic journey through Anna Clyne's powerful orchestral work, This Midnight Hour. 

Today, we explore the music of harpist and composer Jacqueline Kerrod. Kerrod began her musical journey enchanted by Mozart, but she now boldly straddles the worlds of classical and experimental music. Hear the world premiere of Kerrod’s own composition, Bumping Along, a piece that highlights the powerful, dramatic, and sometimes "gnarly" possibilities of the harp.

Johannes Brahms composed the powerful opening movement of his Piano Concerto No. 1 amid great personal turmoil. The concerto reflects Brahms’s complex emotions about the decline of his mentor, Robert Schumann. On today's show, pianist Yefim Bronfman joins conductor Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra for a performance of this moving piece.

Composer Carlos Simon grew up in the African American Pentecostal Church, where lively worship services featured singing, dancing, and sometimes speaking in tongues. Today, we're highlighting Simon's 'Four Black American Dances'—music inspired by his experiences in the church and community where he was raised.