WRTI Picks from NPR Music

Need to brush up on your Bruckner? Or discover his symphonies for the first time? Let conductor Daniel Barenboim guide you through all nine symphonies in this audio primer.

One of the most respected jazz guitarists working today, the Austrian musician has spent his career straddling borders, be they sonic or geographic.

Beth Morrison is not your typical moneyed arts patron — but over the past decade, she's managed to gather the funding and venue support to produce works by some of today's most innovative composers.

The composer's string quartets are known for their use of microtones — and their extreme technical difficulty. Just in time for his 90th birthday, The Kepler Quartet has finally recorded them all.

Barker played with everyone from Billie Holliday to Cab Calloway to Jelly Roll Morton. Scott Simon speaks with Music Inside Out host Gwen Thompkins about the late banjo player and guitarist's legacy.

Film composer Ennio Morricone, known for his use of harmonica and whistling on Western scores, has re-imagined his most popular sounds with help from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra.

Saariaho isn't the first woman composer to stage an opera at New York's Metropolitan Opera — just the first in more than a century. Her opera, L'Amour de Loin, has its New York premiere this week.

Librettist Gene Scheer says the drama of George Bailey's life is "an operatic story." So he, along with composer Jake Heggie, turned It's a Wonderful Life into an opera.

At a time when we have become immune to shock and where hyperbole rules, Marin Alsop argues that Mahler's Sixth Symphony provides the perfect soundtrack.

"Music can be a real guiding light towards empathy, and I can't think of any better prescription," DiDonato says. The opera star's latest album turns to Baroque arias to address present-day conflict.