by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At Noon, Florence Mustric plays J.S. Bach on the von Beckerath organ in Trinity Lutheran Church in Ohio City.
The last session in the Quarter-Final Round of the Cleveland International Piano Competition will take place today at 2 pm in Reinberger Chamber Hall at Severance Music Center, when Yelaman Yernur, Mirabelle Kajenjeri, Giuseppe Guarrera, and Zijian Wei play 35 to 40-minute recitals of works of their choice. Following this session, the jury will announce the four pianists who will advance to the Semi-Finals.
And tonight at 7:30, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s City Stages will present Brazilian singer & multi-instrumentalist Bia Ferriera at Transformer Station.
IN MEMORIAM:
In a New York Times article posted from Berlin, Jeffrey Arlo Brown writes that “Wolfgang Rihm (pictured above), a composer whose forceful, shape-shifting output reinvigorated contemporary classical music, died on Saturday in Ettlingen, Germany. He was 72.
“Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 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.” Then the composer ended his career as “the Abbé Liszt” after taking minor orders in the Catholic Church.
Listen to two 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, and third-place winner François Dumont programmed his tone poem, Vallée d’Obermann, for his semi-final round in the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition.
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.
