By Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At 9am, 2pm, and 7pm, 19 young contestants in the Cooper International Piano Competition will play 40-minute recitals in Warner Concert Hall at the Oberlin Conservatory, to be webcast live. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni: George Li, winner of the 2010 inaugural competition with The Cleveland Orchestra.)
And from 2-4pm, Erik Charnofsky’s Not Your Grandmother’s Classical Music airs from the studios of WRUW at Case. Featured music: Mara Gibson’s Folium cubed (soprano saxophone), Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune, Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto, Jacques Hétu’s Trio for Oboe, Violin, and Piano, Jenny Beck’s Stand Still Here (piano) & Sylvius Leopold Weiss’s Partita in d (lute). Click here to listen to the internet feed: or tune in to 91.1 FM in the greater Cleveland area.
Click here to visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings page for more information.
ADDITIONS TO THE CONCERT CALENDAR:
Stars in the Classics will hold two Summer Garden Concerts on August 20 & 24. Details here.
Akron’s Urban Troubadour has announced two new roving adventures. Click here for information.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On July 31, 1886, Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt died in Bayreuth, Germany at the age of 74. The 19th-century classical equivalent of a 20th-century rock star, Liszt’s solo piano performances gave rise to such pan-European fame that the poet Heinrich Heine characterized audience acclaim as “Lisztomania.” The composer ended his career rather differently as “the Abbé Liszt” after taking minor orders in the Catholic Church.
Here are three Cleveland performances that feature his forward-looking piano music.
Vladimir Horowitz played Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata at Severance Hall on October 31 of 1976.
Third-place winner François Dumont programmed his tone poem, Vallée d’Obermann, for his semi-final round in the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition.
And more recently, Martín García García, who won first prize in the 2021 Cleveland Competition, chose three Liszt works for his Semi-Final Round. After playing Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie in C, D. 760 he performed “Les cloches de Genève (Nocturne)” from Années de Pèlerinage, the Étude de Concert, S. 145, No. 2 (“Gnomenreigen”), and the Transcendental Etude, S. 139, No. 10. Watch here.
Finally, another famous performer takes on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
