by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Three organizations have performances scheduled this weekend:
Ohio Light Opera ends its season with Brigadoon (Friday at 2 pm), Carousel (Friday at 7:30), Bitter Sweet (Saturday at 2 pm), Patience (Saturday at 7:30) and The Cousin from Batavia, (Sunday at 2 pm) in Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster;
The Cleveland Orchestra plays at Blossom on Saturday at 7 pm (Daniele Rustioni conducts with pianist Alessio Bax, pictured).
And Piano Cleveland’s Piano Days presents Natalie Tenenbaum in “The Piano Re-Imagined” at the Hanna Theatre in Playhouse Square on Saturday at 7:30 pm.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Pianist Leon Fleisher died in hospice in Baltimore on August 2, 2020 at the age of 92. 
Read a New York Times obituary by Allan Kozinn here, and a Washington Post obituary by Anne Midgette — who co-authored Fleisher’s 2010 autobiography, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music — here.
As Midgette notes, “He performed in leading concert halls and became the preferred soloist of George Szell, the formidable conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. His recordings with Szell remain benchmarks for their clarity, precision and sheer expressive musicality; Brahms’s first piano concerto was a touchstone.” Listen to that 1958 recording here, which Fleisher made at the age of 30.
In 2010, Fleisher led 16 young musicians in a weeklong series of master classes at Carnegie Hall with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Pamela Frank. In this short video, Ma invited Fleisher to play an excerpt from the Concerto “to demonstrate rhythmic freedom within a measure of music.”
