by Daniel Hathaway
Cleveland’s own Zsolt Bognár will appear on the next Tri-C Classical Piano Series event on Sunday, February 7 at 2:00 pm in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “This is a program that has been very close to me,” he said in a Skype conversation yesterday. “I’ve performed it a lot privately, but never publicly here in Cleveland. It includes works that I recorded on my debut album.” The concert is free.
That CD, entitled Franz and Franz, highlighting music by Schubert and Liszt, was recorded in Berlin and released in 2013 on the Con Brio label. On Sunday, Bognár will add a set of pieces by Edvard Grieg to round out his program of 19th-century Romantic music.
The pianist will begin with four pieces by Schubert: an Impromptu in A-flat, then the Drei Klavierstücke, D. 946, “a set of three posthumous impromptus never performed during the composer’s lifetime,” he said. [Read more…]
On Sunday October 4 at 3:00 pm in Pilgrim Congregational Church, 
There was plenty of piano music to be heard at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory during the ten days of the Cleveland International Piano Competition’s recent Young Artists Competition, but in addition to the performances by the twenty-five contestants, ages 12-18, four seasoned recitalists were invited to play solo programs as well. Mariam Batsashvili knows her way around international competitions, while Vassily Primakov, Sean Chen and Alexander Schimpf are veterans of CIPC itself. 
What could be more delightful than two sparkling early Beethoven works featuring a riveting young pianist and a fine chamber orchestra, all wrapped up in a 75-minute concert format and presented without intermission? That was the recipe for success as the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra opened its latest season on Saturday evening, September 6 at the Breen Center in Ohio City. The program consisted of Beethoven’s first symphony and first piano concerto, with Cleveland pianist Zsolt Bognár at the Steinway and music director Carlton Woods on the podium.
Under its music director Carlton Woods, Blue Water Chamber Orchestra will play two “firsts” in its season opener at the Breen Center in Ohio City on Saturday, September 6 at 7:30 pm. Not premieres, mind you, but rather the Number One entries in Ludwig van Beethoven’s opus list in the categories of symphonies and piano concertos.