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Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition: Final Rounds (August 7 & 8)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The pianists who remained on the bench after the rather brutal cut on Wednesday evening in Cleveland Piano’s Virtu(al)oso Competition (the field was reduced from 30 to 6) played virtual 30- to 35-minute programs in the Final Round on Friday and Saturday, pre-recorded at international Steinway locations at the same time as their First Round performances. Here are some impressions.

Friday, August 7 — Session 1

Tamila Salimdjanova (28, Uzbekistan) brought two works to the session: Debussy’s Estampes and Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7. She gave the three-movement Debussy (“Pagodes,” “La soirée dans Grenade” and “Jardins sous la pluie”) a fluent performance, but the scenes offer more color possibilities than she exploited, and an abundance of dynamic details that went overlooked. Salimdjanova played the Prokofiev masterfully, but the outer movements needed more sheer brutality to reflect the Sonata’s Stalinist context and to offset the sentimental slow movement. [Read more…]

Piano Cleveland Virtu(al)oso: Questions for the six finalists

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by Daniel Hathaway

On Friday evening, August 7 at 7:00, the first three of six finalists in Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso online competition will be heard playing 30-35 minute programs previously video recorded at Steinway locations in the U.S. and abroad. The remaining three finalists will go online on Saturday, August 8.

We caught up with all of them either by email or Skype to ask versions of these questions:

1) Waiting is always a part of competitions, but this one is unusual. How did it feel to have so long to wait between recording your program and having it streamed in the First Round.

2) Did you listen to yourself in the first round? What was that like?

3) Do you plan to listen to yourself in the final round?

4) What’s your favorite piece in your final round program, and why?

5) Based on your experience with Virtu(al)oso, if the pandemic continues well into the future, would you consider entering a virtual competition again? [Read more…]

Six Virtu(al)oso finalists named, to play on Friday & Saturday

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by Daniel Hathaway

On Wednesday evening, Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso jury named the six pianists who will play 30- to 35-minute programs in the final round of the 2020 online competition. The sessions will be streamed on Friday and Saturday at 7:00 pm. Click here for their bios and programs.

Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition: Round One, Sessions 1-6 (July 30-August 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

International piano competitions normally take place in real time in a single location. But when SARS-CoV-2 forced Piano Cleveland to postpone its Cleveland International Piano Competition until 2021, the organization decided to hold an online contest in its place.

Thus 30 pianists, chosen to compete in Virtu(al)oso out of a field of 130 applicants, turned up at Steinway locations in Cleveland, New York, London, Hamburg and Beijing, each to video record a 20-minute and a 30- to 35-minute program of music of their choice. There were no repertoire hoops to jump through: the only stipulation was that pieces be in contrasting styles. And to guarantee fair comparisons, visual and sonic values were to be standardized among the five recording venues.

Then during six First Round sessions beginning on July 30, the recordings of five pianists would be streamed each evening, to be vetted by a jury watching remotely on their own screens. Six pianists would be chosen to move on to the Final Round on August 7 and 8. [Read more…]

M.U.S.i.C. – Stars in the Classics to host backyard garden concert Aug. 15

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by Mike Telin

Over the past few weeks, area musicians and performing arts organizations have presented concerts on front porches, parking lots, and even at a baseball field. Another obvious place would be a spacious backyard — should you be lucky enough to have one.

When everything shut down, M.U.S.i.C. – Stars in the Classics began posting archival videos and later employing their musicians to create new ones. “We’re still doing that,” M.U.S.i.C’s Artistic Director Jodi Kanter said by telephone. “Then one of our musicians asked, ‘Why can’t we create an outdoor performance where everyone can be socially distanced?’” As luck would have it, Kanter happens to have a large backyard.

On Saturday, August 15, M.U.S.i.C. invites you to spend “A Musical Summer Evening in the Garden.” The outdoor event will be held at the artistic director’s house in Orange Village, where audiences can enjoy a live program while maintaining social distancing. Seating will begin at 6:30 pm and the concert starts at 7:00 pm. The audience will be limited to 40 people. Click here for tickets and location information. The rain date is Sunday, August 16 at 7:00 pm.

[Read more…]

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

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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. [Read more…]

Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition:
A Conversation with Anna Han

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by Daniel Hathaway

American pianist Anna Han, 24, was born in Mesa, Arizona, earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Juilliard, and has won top prizes in the 2016 Gina Bachauer and 2019 Hilton Head competitions. A keen chamber music player, she is a founding member of the Munin Piano Trio, and has recorded for the Steinway label.

I caught up with Han in Cleveland, where she was hanging out after having recorded her two rounds at the Steinway Gallery. I started by asking her what her life has been like since the pandemic hit in March.

“I’ve spent the last six years in New York City, where I gave a concert with my trio on March 1. At that point, none of us had any concept of what this would turn into. I had a two week residency in Canada that was to start a couple of weeks later, but when that was cancelled, I ended up moving back to Arizona at the end of the month.”

At home in the West, Han settled into a very different style of life. “I had all these pressure-cooker things lined up, and suddenly I didn’t. [Read more…]

Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition:
A Conversation with Priscila Navarro

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by Daniel Hathaway

26-year-old pianist Priscila Navarro will sail into Round One, Session 5 of Piano Cleveland’s online competition on Monday, August 3 under two national flags: Peru and Canada.

“I have dual citizenship,” she said in a Skype conversation from Florida. “My father worked in Canada for many, many years and became a citizen — but I was born and raised in Huanaco, Peru, about nine hours northeast of Lima, in between the mountains and the Amazon. I moved to Lima when I was nine to study at the conservatory, which is where I really got to know classical music.”

Her education took her to Miami for a master’s degree and artist diploma at the University, then on to Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, where she graduated summa cum laude. Like many other performers, her professional life came to a sudden halt in March. [Read more…]

The Legacy of Black Classical Music: 
Composer Florence Price

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by Lilyanna D’Amato

In November, 1943, composer Florence Price began a letter to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky with a painful admission: “to begin with, I have two handicaps — those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.”

Acutely aware of the classical tradition’s discriminatory leanings, Price was direct. She desperately needed Koussevitzky to program her compositions. The work of a woman composer is predetermined, she said, “to be light, froth, lacking in depth, logic and virility… add to that the incident of race — and I hope you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position.”

At that point in her career, she had already achieved unprecedented success. The first-prize winner of the 1932 Wanamaker music contest and the first Black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, she was a distinguished member of the Black intelligentsia, fraternizing with the likes of W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She had received national acclaim for her nearly faultless virtuosity, and yet, she never heard back from Koussevitzky. [Read more…]

Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition:
A Chat with Jonas Aumiller

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by Daniel Hathaway

German pianist Jonas Aumiller will perform in the 5th Session of the First Round of Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso Competition on Monday, August 3 at 7:00 pm. His 20-minute program includes a Busoni transcription of a J.S. Bach organ Prelude and Fugue, a Scriabin Etude, and a Rachmaninoff Etude-tableau.

Aumiller, 22, earned his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the Conservatorio F. A. Bonporti in Trento, Italy, and went on to complete a graduate diploma at Juilliard under Sergei Babayan. He’s currently working on a master’s degree with Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

I reached him in his hometown of Munich for a Skype conversation, and began by asking him what his life has been like since everything fell apart in March.

“I was still in Cleveland when the pandemic started in Germany, then I decided pretty quickly to leave America as I was afraid they would close the border, which they did.” But luckily, not before Aumiller had booked a flight back home. [Read more…]

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