by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Two free concerts today at 12 noon – Music Near the Market presents organist Robert Meyers in works by J.S. Bach, Scheidemann, Pasquini, and J.C.F. Fischer on the Beckerath instrument (pictured) in Trinity Lutheran Church, Ohio City, and Piano Cleveland hosts an Institute Community Concert at the Natural History Museum.
Ohio Light Opera stages Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard this afternoon at 2 and Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow tonight at 7:30 in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster.
Today at 4:00 pm and 7:30, the Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists holds its Final Masterclass Round Sessions led by Jean-Yves Thibaudet in Mixon Hall at CIM.
For details of these and other classical music events, please visit the ClevelandClassical.com concert listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Piano Cleveland has announced the Finalists and Rising Star Winner of the 2026 Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists.
During the Semi-Final Round, thirteen competitors — three Rising Stars (10–12), five Juniors (13–15), and five Seniors (16–18) — performed solo recitals and collaborated with professional musicians from ENCORE Chamber Music Institute. The jury, chaired by Olga Kern, has narrowed the field down to three Junior Finalists and three Senior Finalists as well as awarding the following medals to contestants in the Rising Star Division:
First Place – Wilson Liu, 12, United States
Second Place – Khloe Wu, 11, Canada
Third Place – Ethan Wang, 11, Canada
Junior Division
Ryan Huang, 15, Canada / United States
Jueon Lee, 14 , South Korea
Yixen Shen, 15, China
Senior Division
Chenxu Han, 17, China
Guillermo Hernández Barrocal, 18, Spain
Yurim Kim, 17, South Korea
The Junior and Senior Division Finalists now advance to the Final Round, taking place from today, July 29 through Friday, July 31 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Kulas Hall.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On July 29, 1856, Robert Schumann died at the age of 46 after spending two years in an asylum in Bonn, having been taken there at his own request after he attempted suicide by throwing himself off a bridge into the Rhine River.
Among his legacies were wonderful cycles of songs and piano works, four symphonies, and a quantity of chamber music.
Listen here to a recording of Dichterliebe by German baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist James Baillieu (the two performed the cycle on the Cleveland Art Song Festival series at the Cleveland Institute of Music in January, 2019).
Schumann’s symphonies have frequently come under fire for what conductors have considered the composer’s inept orchestration. George Szell, who made significant changes to the scores, recorded them between 1958 and 1960. Click here to listen to all four works. A Gramophone review of the cycle’s later release on CDs noted:
Szell loved the Schumann symphonies (his eloquent booklet annotation makes that abundantly clear), but readers in search of Urtext reportage should be warned that he attempts to correct – and here I quote the Maestro himself – “minor lapses [in orchestration] due to inexperience” with “remedies” that range from “subtle adjustments of dynamic marks to the radical surgery of re-orchestrating whole stretches.
