by Mike Telin
Life has been good for Ran Dank and Soyeon Kate Lee since they won medals at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2007 and 2003, respectively. Since those wins, both pianists have enjoyed successful careers as solo artists, as well as holding positions as Assistant Professors of Piano at the Cincinnati College- Conservatory of Music.
This week Dank and Lee will showcase their skills as duo pianists when they return to Cleveland for a performance on Thursday, June 7 at 8:00 in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music. The concert is presented as part of the Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists, which began last week and runs through Saturday, June 9.
The Duo’s program will include works by Mozart, Scriabin, Janáček, and Liszt as well as a four-hands version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. “It’s a special piece for us because we played it at our wedding concert in New York City,” Lee said during a joint telephone call with Dank. “A wedding is sort of a rite,” he added with a laugh. “But you can’t quite call the piece an arrangement because parts of it were originally conceived for four hands. So in some ways, the orchestrated version is the arrangement in the same way Ravel would orchestrate his piano works.”
It’s a familiar feeling for musicians: to have mastered a difficult piece, then discover someone a quarter their age playing it twice as well. “It’s amazing from year one to now,” Marc Damoulakis said in a recent conversation about the Modern Snare Drum Competition. “Stuff that we used to think was hard, these kids are coming in younger and younger and playing with ease. And I honestly don’t think it would’ve happened without this competition.”
It’s an epic feeling when three superheroes, from separate stories and with their own distinct powers, team up. The real-life, artsy, and Cleveland-related parallel to that? A collaboration next week among three prominent local institutions from three different disciplines.
Like many first-generation Americans whose families had been forced to leave their homes because of Nazi atrocities during World War II, pianist Sandra Shapiro grew up not fully understanding the circumstances that led to her father’s arrival in the United States.
