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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…]

Virtu(al)oso Piano Competition: Questions for Arseniy Gusev

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by Daniel Hathaway

Russian pianist Arseniy Gusev was born in St. Petersburg in 1998, where he studied both piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

He came to the U.S. in 2018 to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music — piano with Sergei Babayan, and composition with Keith Fitch.

Gusev will play selections by Schönberg, Schubert, and J.S. Bach in Session 3 of Piano Cleveland’s virtual competition on Saturday, August 1, beginning at 7:00 pm. At his request, we sent him some questions by email, and received delightful and thoughtful responses.

The pandemic has upset everyone’s lives. I hope your family in Russia is safe and well. How long has it been since you last saw them?

I am grateful for a chance to see and communicate with my family in my dreams. Even though we are in touch through email and social media, and it’s been a lot of months since we saw each other in person, for me the most important bond which helps to keep the family together is to cherish each of the family members in my heart like a treasure. [Read more…]

Kosower to complete Bach cycle online at Trinity Cathedral July 31

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by Daniel Hathaway

Cleveland Orchestra Principal Cello Mark Kosower, who already had an extensive following, added impressively to his fan club in the first of two online performances of J.S. Bach’s solo cello suites streamed from Trinity Cathedral on June 5. He returns for the second performance this Friday, July 31 at 7:00 pm.

“It certainly was a very powerful and meaningful experience for me, and we were able to reach a lot of people,” the cellist said in a recent telephone conversation. “By the time the video had gone around and lived on Facebook for a number of weeks, we got 13,300 views.”

That performance was presented free of charge, but allowed viewers to contribute online to a relief fund for musicians affected by the pandemic. “It was an important activity for the causes I was playing for,” Kosower said. “Looking forward, I feel that we’re still very much in the pandemic. My approach to the second concert won’t be so different, but what will be different, of course, is Bach’s other three suites. Each of them has its own individual story to tell, heading toward the pinnacle of the sixth suite.”

Kosower’s first performance included Nos. 1, 3, and 5. On Friday, he’ll play the even-numbered suites, but in a special order. [Read more…]

Sun Valley Music Festival: Conversations with Marc Damoulakis and Si-Yan Darren Li 

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by Mike Telin

With the absence of Northeast Ohio’s annual feast of live summertime classical music offerings, I’m thankful that we live in a time when technology can help fill the void in the artistic soul. That technology can also take you to far-off festivals that you’ve always wished you could attend, but never have had the opportunity.

From Monday, July 27, to Wednesday, August 19, you can attend the 36th annual Sun Valley Music Festival Summer Season for free from the comfort of your own home, or backyard. The free, one-time-only webcasts were developed by Festival Music Director Alasdair Neale in collaboration with Creative Director James Darrah, who served as stage director for The Cleveland Orchestra’s 2015 production of Richard Strauss’ Daphne.

The performances, recorded in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Rochester, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Toronto, feature single-location, socially distanced performances and multi-location, video-synced performances which will also include commentary by Alasdair Neale and conversations with guest artists and Orchestra musicians. The free, one-time-only concerts will be broadcast at 8:30 pm Eastern time on the Idaho-based Festival’s website. [Read more…]

Sphinx Performance Academy “at” CIM: advocating for diversity while going online

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by Jarrett Hoffman

If there’s one classical music festival that best represents this particular moment in time, it might be the Sphinx Performance Academy. Not only does it focus on cultural diversity, and not only has it shifted online this summer due to the coronavirus pandemic, but it has also taken on a new dimension amidst the movement for racial justice sparked by the death of George Floyd.

SPA, as the festival is known, is a full-scholarship program focusing on chamber music and solo playing for string players ages 11-17 who come from cultural backgrounds that are underrepresented in classical music. It’s one of the many programs of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, founded in 1997 and devoted to diversity in the arts.

Multiple conservatories and schools of music have hosted SPA since it launched in 2004, including the Cleveland Institute of Music since 2017. And with physical hosting out of the question this year, the CIM-affiliated session will run online from July 25 to August 8. (That will follow other virtual sessions of SPA that took place earlier in July and June through partnerships with the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School.)

[Read more…]

Piano Cleveland’s Virtu(al)oso fields a rich mix of contestants 

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by Daniel Hathaway

Now that Piano Cleveland has posted biographies and repertoire selections for the 30 pianists who will be competing long-distance later this month in the organization’s first online competition, it’s time to get to know those players a little better, both as performers and individuals.

As is the case with all international competitions, participants come from far and wide: from China (4), Russia (4), Italy (3), the U.S. (3), Japan (2), the United Kingdom (2), and Austria, Azerbaijan, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Peru/Canada, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan (1 each). Those are their official home countries, although their studies have dispersed them all over the map.

The final 30, announced on July 1, were winnowed by a selection jury from videos sent in by more than 130 hopefuls. The competition will be conducted remotely, through videos recorded at Steinway facilities in the U.S., Europe, and China. By the time the first round officially begins on July 31, twelve will have performed in Hamburg, six each in Cleveland and London, four in New York, and two in Beijing.

Ranging in age from 18 to 30, the contestants are well accustomed to the pressures of international competitions, having taken home top prizes in a long list of contests. Several have already recorded more than one album. At least four of the contestants are also composers who will include their own works in their performances. [Read more…]

Akron Symphony announces
Interlude Season for 2020-2021

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by Staff

This past Monday, the Akron Symphony Orchestra revised its plans for the coming year. The previously announced 2020-2021 concert season has been moved forward to  2021-2022, and the Orchestra will instead present the ASO Interlude Season — Akron Symphony’s Gift to the Community, designed to share free music throughout  Northeast Ohio.

“I’m tremendously excited about the Interlude Season,” ASO Music Director Christopher Wilkins said in a press release. “I do mourn the loss of a full orchestra season. But ironically, it gives us the chance to do a great many things we’ve always wanted to do. Our greatest asset is the creativity of our musicians, and this new plan allows us to utilize their skills in an extraordinary variety of ways.”

During the season, which will run from August 2020 through May 2021, ASO musicians will provide free performances with numerous collaborative partners, including the Akron Art Museum, the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank, Akron Public Schools, Akron-Summit County Public Library, the Akron Zoo, International Institute of Akron, Jilly’s Music Room, Love Akron, Mustard Seed Market & Café, Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, Summa Health, the Summit County Historical Society, and Tuesday Musical Association. [Read more…]

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