Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition: Round One ends on August 4

August 4, 2020 by Daniel Hathaway

by Daniel Hathaway

Tonight around 8:45 pm, when U.K. pianist Martin James Bartlett, playing virtually from the Steinway Gallery in London, lifts his hands from the keyboard after the last notes of Shostakovich’s Polka for W.R., 30 contestants will have completed their 20-minute First Round performances in Piano Cleveland’s 2020 all-online Virtu(al)oso Competition.

We’ve been following the performances since last Thursday, and will share some thoughts and impressions on Wednesday afternoon, August 5. On Wednesday evening at 7 pm EDT, the jury will name the six players who will go on to the Final Round, playing 30- to 35-minute mini-recitals on Friday and Saturday.

It’s a bit surreal experiencing a competition online when you know that all the performances have already been frozen for weeks in the form of video recordings made in Cleveland, New York, London, Hamburg, and Beijing — but strange times demand clever solutions.

Check the website tomorrow to find out how well we thought the 30 candidates were able to put their individual musical personalities across on the screen, in spite of buffering, latency, and all the other technical vagaries of the Internet.

Published on ClevelandClassical.com August 4, 2020.

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About Daniel Hathaway

Daniel Hathaway founded ClevelandClassical.com in September, 2008, after a thirty-one year tenure as music director of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, where he founded the Wednesday Noon Brownbag Concert Series and Trinity Chamber Orchestra. A graduate of Harvard College and the Episcopal Divinity School, he also studied historical musicology at Princeton and Harvard Universities. Before coming to Cleveland in 1977, he served as head of humanities at the Sunset Hill School in Kansas City and as head of arts at Groton School in Massachusetts. In Cleveland, he has served on the music staff of Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Theater Festival, and the faculty of Laurel School. As an organist, Hathaway has played recitals in the U.S., England, France, Germany, and Austria. He team-teaches Music Journalism at Oberlin College and Conservatory and is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America.

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This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

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by Daniel Hathaway

This article was originally published on Cleveland.com

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