WRTI Picks from NPR Music

The composer's operas for TV completely rethought the structures of the old European model for a new generation.

For this year's Academy Awards, three documentaries — 20 Feet from Stardom, The Square and The Lady in Number 6 — use musicians' lives and experiences to frame some very big ideas.

If there's ever a stereotypical bunch of contenders for the Best Original Score Oscar, the class of 2014 definitely isn't it. Meet them — and see the haunting short that's a companion to Gravity.

Eric Dolphy's creativity was exploding early in 1964, and he was finding more players who could keep up. Out to Lunch is free and focused, dissonant and catchy, wide open and swinging all at once.

The star violinist's new multi-year project goes to the heart of a difficult and fascinating era: the 1930s, when dazzle and sorrow commingled musically.

What does the champion ice dancer do after winning gold in Sochi? Play Vivaldi on the violin, of course.

Danilo Pérez got his start playing piano with Dizzy Gillespie. The celebrated composer's latest project is an ambitious one: 500 years of trade, exploration and colonization represented in music.

There's something tender and specific about the ways elders like Frank Wess shaped their notes.

For Valentine's Day, get to know pairs of lovebirds making beautiful music together. "It's always nice to be onstage and get a little alone time — even if there's an orchestra of a hundred and an audience of 2000," says conductor David Robertson, who is married to pianist Orli Shaham.

Compared to his work on Zero Dark Thirty and the Harry Potter films, Alexandre Desplat's Oscar-nominated score is strikingly spare — yet the composer says it was one of the hardest he's ever written.