by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Organist Robert Myers plays a 12:15 noon recital, “Going Baroque,” on the Rudolph von Beckerath instrument in Trinity Lutheran Church, Ohio City, and The Cleveland International Piano Competition’s Concert Truck visits Wade Oval Wednesdays today at 5:30 with a payload of a baby grand and a selection of 2024 quarter-finalists. Bring a lawn chair and enjoy a free concert.
Ohio Light Opera presents a 2 pm matinee performance of Franz Lehár’s The Count of Luxembourg (pictured) and a 7:30 production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Gondoliers in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster.
For details of upcoming concerts, visit our Concert Listings page.
CATCHING UP WITH GEORGE LI:
Gramophone reviews pianist George Li’s third album, Movements: Schumann, Ravel, Stravinsky.
Early on, Li, who is now 29, dazzled Northeast Ohio audiences by winning the inaugural Thomas and Evon Cooper International Piano Competition at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2010 at the age of 14.
In a joint review by Daniel Hathaway and Nicholas Jones of the final round with The Cleveland Orchestra, Jones wrote,
I wonder what these talented young musicians will be doing in ten or twenty years. I hope they will be playing music: certainly their success here gives every indication of promise that way. More than likely, they will be playing concertos like these with major orchestras around the world. But I also wonder how they will further develop the soul that each of them already shows. One of the prizes for each of these winners is a full scholarship to Oberlin. Even if they don’t study there, I hope they will go to a school where the liberal arts joins with the development of such talent as they have, where they can broaden and deepen. Perhaps I’ll end up with one of them in my Shakespeare class, where we can explore those age-old, always-new texts and their insights into the soul.
Like Yo-Yo Ma, will one of these players major in Philosophy? Will one of them, like Jennifer Koh, begin to explore the knotty world of contemporary music? Will one, like competition judge Malcolm Bilson, turn to early music and its intriguing problems of interpretation? Will one of them, like Gustavo Dudamel, draw into music the legions of the poor and oppressed?”
It will be interesting to keep an eye on not only the final three but the original forty-three pianists as their careers progress.
It’s still early days for George Li’s career, but as Patrick Rucker writes in the Gramophone review, since winning the silver medal at the Tchaikovsky competition, Li “completed the Harvard University/New England Conservatory dual degree programme with a bachelor’s in English Literature and a master’s in Music in 2019 and, three years later, received the Artist Diploma at NEC. He has toured worldwide, appearing with top conductors and orchestras, as well as forging chamber music partnerships with the likes of the Dover Quartet and violinist Stella Chen. And he has recorded. First came a mixed recital of Haydn, Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninov, recorded at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre (10/17). Then Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the London Philharmonic under Vasily Petrenko, along with selections from both Italian years of Liszt’s Années plus the Don Juan Fantasy (1/20). Now, on his third Warner Classics release, Li offers us Stravinsky’s transcriptions for Rubinstein from Petrushka, Ravel’s Waltzes and a deep dive into Schumann.”
To catch up, read our preview and review of George Li’s Oberlin Artist Recital series recital in March of 2014, and watch a video of the pianist’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra under the direction of Federico Cortese at in Sanders Theatre on February 26, 2018.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1880, Swiss-American composer, photographer, humanist, and philosopher Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva. Some indication of his standing in the international music world is suggested by the list of musicians who were named as founders of the Ernest Bloch Society in 1937: “The President was Albert Einstein and the society numbered Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Henry Wood, Bruno Walter and Ralph Vaughan Williams amongst its illustrious Vice-Presidents.”
We have written about the founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music on the anniversary of his death, but today we remember him through his Sacred Service (Avodath Hakodesh), a full-length, through-composed setting of the Jewish liturgy. Listen to a classic 1960 recording by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic here.
And click here to watch a Cleveland Institute of Music video of Bloch’s Suite No. 1 for Cello Solo played by Cleveland Orchestra cellist Richard Weiss.
