Why is a symphony relevant for today? It's a question Kent Nagano poses as the Montréal Symphony Orchestra closes out the Spring for Music festival at Carnegie Hall tonight. The program traces a history of the Symphony, ending with Beethoven's Fifth. Live broadcast at 8 pm.

The clown Pagliacci sings this lament in Leoncavallo's opera, but the aria has also been commandeered to express sadness and frustration throughout popular culture.

The Tiger Mothers may have been right all along: Music lessons as a kid may make you sharper decades later. A new study finds that adults with musical training appear to have sharper thinking and hearing skills than their less musically inclined peers.

Tonight at 8 pm, our live broadcasts from Carnegie Hall continue. Soprano Dawn Upshaw joins the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for the New York premiere of Maria Schneider's Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories. Schneider is among today's leading jazz composers.

The Library of Congress has launched the National Jukebox, a new Web site offering more than 10,000 extremely rare recordings of American music. Fritz Kreisler, Marion Anderson and Enrico Caruso are among the classical standouts.

Violinist Jennifer Koh and cellist Anssi Karttunen talk about the rich repertoire for violin and cello, including pieces by Ravel, Kodaly, Villa-Lobos, Honegger. See them perform a duo by Erwin Schulhoff in the WQXR café.

Tonight the Oregon Symphony makes its Carnegie Hall debut with a war-themed program of Adams, Britten, Ives and Vaughan Williams. While it may seem ripped from the headlines, the theme resonates beyond current events, says its music director, Carlos Kalmar. Live broadcast at 8 pm.

JoAnn Falletta's appointment to the Ulster Symphony comes just weeks after the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera named Kayoko Dan as its new music director. Still, women are outnumbered by men on major podiums. Take our poll.

Queens-born and New York-educated JoAnn Falletta has been appointed the new principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland. The appointment marks the first time that the ensemble will be led by an American, or by a woman.

Carnegie Hall becomes part-laboratory, part-pep rally when seven orchestras -- and many of their fans -- arrive this month for the inaugural Spring for Music festival. View photos from the festival, which is being broadcast on WQXR.

Anne Akiko Meyers and Sarah Chang are two of today's most in-demand violin soloists. Yuja Wang is a fast-rising piano virtuoso. For this Mother's Day, they shared their own reflections on the holiday.

The Georgian-born violinist Lisa Batiashvili is a fast-rising international star, but also the mother of two young children: a six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son. On this Mother's Day, she reveals the difficult balance between career and parenting.

The Metropolitan Opera has announced that James Levine is pulling out of Thursday night's performance of Die Walküre, due to illness. He'll be replaced by Derrick Inouye, who has conducted other performances at the Met including Tosca and Don Pasquale.

The Kronos Quartet, a leading ensemble spotted at both Carnegie Hall and Le Poisson Rouge this season, have nabbed both the Avery Fisher Prize and the Polar Prize for 2011. Founder David Harrington spoke with us about it.

The 2011 Tony Award nominations were announced today from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Tell us who you think will take home the awards in the musical categories.

As WQXR examines the future of American orchestras in a special Greene Space event on May 3 (webcast live on WQXR.org), please take our poll on what orchestras need to provide audiences.

The Met’s 45-ton set piece for its new Ring cycle, which opened the current season with a new production of Das Rheingold and now commands the stage in the cycle’s second opera, Die Walküre, continues to present unexpected challenges to performers.

For our live audio streams of Carnegie Hall’s Spring for Music concerts running Friday, May 6 through Thursday, May 14, WQXR is working in collaboration with the consulting, design and engineering firm Arup to bring innovative 3D sound live to the WQXR.org audience.

Carl Stalling composed one new cartoon score every week for twenty-two years at Warner Brothers. This Saturday, we hear his composition for "To Itch His Own," in which Angelo the Flea terrorizes unsuspecting dogs.