by Jarrett Hoffman
At one point during our recent conversation on Zoom, pianist/composer and Cleveland native Rob Kovacs gestured behind him to a bookshelf holding what he estimated to be 350-400 old video game cartridges. He laughed. “I’ve been collecting for about fifteen years, and I just keep going.”
His point was that if you add up all of those games, there’s a bounty of music that very few people have heard. “A lot of it’s great,” he said. “And when you hear it on a real, acoustic instrument, played in a fairly virtuosic way, I think it helps to make more people interested, and certainly helps them view it in a different light.”
That’s exactly what Kovacs aims to achieve when he brings this music into a classical context in two free, live-streamed concerts early this year: first on the Local 4 Music Fund’s Tuning In series on Thursday, January 21 at 7:00 pm, then on the Maltz Performing Arts Center’s Silver Hall Series on Sunday, March 7 at 3:00 pm.
When a festival runs for long enough, it becomes interesting to look back and remember that it wasn’t always a staple of the local culture. At one time, it was entirely new.