by Peter Feher
This article was originally published on Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Franz Joseph Haydn was one of the first composers to recognize the untapped potential in a promising new keyboard instrument called the fortepiano, which, as the name suggested, could play both loud and soft.
By the time that Sergei Rachmaninoff was writing his most virtuosic piano works some 150 years later, he had exploited the full sweep of the instrument, from crashing bass chords to glassy high notes of exquisite fragility.
The technical breakthroughs made at the keyboard over this period can all too easily be taken for granted in the 21st century, with many of today’s leading soloists achieving correctness at the cost of artistic expression.
On Tuesday evening, October 21, pianist Marc-André Hamelin opened Tuesday Musical’s 2025–26 season in Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall with a program of unusual range and scale. He mapped the human mind and heart across an often-epic landscape — Beethoven’s granite Hammerklavier, Robert Schumann’s not merely scenic Waldszenen, and Ravel’s hallucinatory Gaspard de la nuit.
This article was originally published on 
The release of the fifth episode of The Cleveland Orchestra’s In Focus video series coincided with the elevation of Vinay Parameswaren from assistant to associate conductor of the ensemble and the extension of his contract. Of course, the concert had been pre-recorded a couple of weeks before it appeared on the Adella platform on January 28, but his leadership of the Orchestra on that occasion completely validated that promotion.
