by Daniel Hathaway:
HAPPENING TODAY:
Ohio Light Opera: next-to-last performance of Herman Haller and Eduard Künneke’s The Cousin from Batavia at 2 pm, & final performance of George and Ira Gershwin’s Tip-Toes at 7:30 pm in Freedlander Theatre at The College of Wooster. Tickets available online.
The Cleveland Orchestra’s Summers at Severance continues at 7 pm with Christoph Koncz conducting works by Liszt, Ernst von Dohnányi, and Bartók at Severance Music Center.
Piano Cleveland’s Piano Days wrap up this tonight at 7:30 pm, when Kotaro Fukuma, the 2003 Cleveland International Piano Competition First Prize Winner, returns to the Forest City to play Shimmering Water — 洸, a recital of French Impressionist music by Debussy and Ravel juxtaposed with works by contemporary Japanese composers in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Les Délices has announced their sixth season of free SalonEra webseries episodes and podcasts, which will begin airing on October 6. Video episodes are available on YouTube from their premiere date through June 30, 2026. Podcast episodes remain online in perpetuity. Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On July 31, 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.” The composer ended his career rather differently as “the Abbé Liszt” after taking minor orders in the Catholic Church.
Cleveland Orchestra concerts this weekend at Severance and Blossom both feature works by Liszt, and here are three historical Cleveland performances that included his forward-looking piano music:
Vladimir Horowitz played Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata at Severance Hall on October 31 of 1976.
Third-place winner François Dumont programmed his tone poem, Vallée d’Obermann, for his semi-final round in the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition.
And 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.
