by Mike Telin

Life is busy for Lise de la Salle. The French pianist is currently on a six-week North American tour which has included stops at New York’s Town Hall, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and the Detroit Institute of Arts. “It’s a long tour,” the 29-year-old said by telephone from Dallas, where she was performing Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony. “But concerts like these more than make up for it.”

On Sunday, March 18 at 2:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, the Tri-C Classical Piano Series will present Lise de la Salle in a free program that is all about love.

“I call it my transcendental love program,” the pianist said. “It’s a selection of diverse pieces that reflect the many stages of love, from the happy life and the peaceful love that you find in Schumann’s Widmung and Frühlingsnacht, to the dramatic and dark death in Wagner’s Isoldes Liebestod. And Schumann’s Fantasie in C, especially the first movement, is a ‘love scream’ from Robert to Clara — how deep the emotions are, but this is impossible, tortured love because of Clara’s father.” [Read more…]