Liberace Goes Broadway!

Good news for Liberace fans (and who doesn't like a little kitsch, er camp, from time to time?).

a musical about Liberace, the pianist and entertainer who put the flame in flamboyant, is planned for Broadway this fall.

Deets here. More here.

Now if they would just finish that dang biopic.

Van Cliburn Competition: By the Numbers.

Point.Click. And put your peepers on some number crunching on the Cliburn Competition via the always excellent blog "The Omniscient Mussel"

Here's teaser of the good nuggets awaiting you:

Number of competitions, on average, that a 2009 has competed in already: 3.3

Chances that a participant was born in Asia: 1 in 2

Percentage of Asian participantss that were born in China: 53.3%

Countries represented in the 2009 competition that have not had a winner in previous years: Greece

Check it out. Link

Connecting the Dots: Bill Evans, Rachmaninoff and Van Cliburn

Now this is interesting:

By his own account, the piano music of Sergei Rachmaninoff was long a favorite of jazz pianist Bill Evans; on his final European tours he carried with him a cassette of the composer's Fourth Concerto, and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which he and the trio would study and enjoy. Fellow pianist Warren Bernhardt has related how he and Bill would spend hours playing through the two-piano reduction of the composer's Third Concerto, fascinated by the rich harmonic textures of the work's slow movement in particular.

I love Bill Evan's music. This just simply makes sense. Good sense.

More about Evans and Cliburn's victory in Moscow can be found here.

Krystian Zimerman's "shocking" Announcement

According to the LAT Zimerman shocked his audience with a political rant and an announcement that he no longer be performing in the US.

The key graf:

Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski’s "Variations on a Polish Folk Theme," Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience. In a quiet but angry voice that did not project well, he indicated that he could no longer play in a country whose military wants to control the whole world. 
“Get your hands off of my country,” he said.  He also made reference to the U.S. military detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

I don't find it terribly outrageous or shocking (it's quite a ways from the Dixie Chicks zone). And good for him and too bad for us he won't be back.

On the upside: no more schlepping his piano around in pieces.

He travels with his own Steinway piano, which he has altered himself. But shortly after 9/11, the instrument was confiscated at JFK Airport when he landed in New York to give a recital at Carnegie Hall. Thinking the glue smelled funny, the TSA decided to take no chances and destroyed the instrument. Since then he has shipped his pianos in parts, which he reassembles by hand after he lands

.

Link

London Internation Piano Competition - Finalists

Here are the announced finalists for the 2009 London Int. Piano Competition and the concerto they will perform in the final round.

Andrejs  Osokins, Latvia   (Liszt - Concerto no.1 in E flat)
Alessandro  Taverna, Italy   (Chopin - Concerto in E minor, op.11)
Behzod  Abduraimov, Uzbekistan   (Prokofiev - Concerto in C, op.26)

Final round is tomorrow night. Good luck to all!

cliburn confidential

Check out the "Cliburn Confidential", a series of links to conversations/interviews with the current crop of Cliburn hopefuls. here's some of what you'll find.

Stephen Beus

Evgeni Bozhanov

Yue Chu

Ran Dank

Ang Li

Chetan Tierra

Natacha Kudritskaya

Michail Lifits

And then the acid kicked in

2009 Avery Fisher Career Grants

Made props to pianists Inon Barnatan and Alessio Bax. They are 2 of 5 musicians to be
awarded the 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grants.

read more here

The Cliburn Competition in 3 minutes - YouTube

Here's some Youtube goodness to prime the pump for ya all.

Speaking of Piano Competitions: Cliburn 2009

Next month Van Cliburn International Piano Competition gets underway. It is arguably the most important of international piano competitions.

Here' s a list of this year's competitors . Ranging in age from 19 to 30,  there  are some new faces, and some  familiar from the competition circuit. (A few competed in the last Cliburn).

Like last year the competition will feature blogs and live webcasts. Details here.  And twitter? I'm sure there will be tweets a plenty. Why not?


(*) Indicates competed in the last Cliburn. Those in bold  I'm especially looking forward to hearing.


(*) Stephen Beus (USA) 27
Evgeni Bozhanov (Bulgaria) 24
Yue Chu (China) 25
Ran Dank (Israel) 27
Alessandro Deljavan (Italy) 22
Yoonjung Han (Korea) 24
Kyu Yeon Kim (Korea) 23
Naomi Kudo (US/Japan) 22
Natacha Kudritskaya (Ukraine) 25
Eduard Kunz (Russia) 28
Andrea Lam (Australia) 27
(*) Soyeon Lee (Korea) Age 29
(*) Ang Li (Canada) 24
Michail Lifits (Germany) 26
Spencer Myer (USA) 30
 (*) Ilya Rashkovskiy (Russia)Age 24
Mayumi Sakamoto (Japan) 26
Yeol Eum Son (Korea) 23
Victor Stanislavsky (Israel) 26
Chetan Tierra (USA) 25
Nobuyuki Tsujii (Japan) 20
Mariangela Vacatello (Italy) 27
Vassilis Varvaresos (Greece) 26
Lukáš Vondráček (Czech Republic) 22
(*) Di Wu (China) 24
Amy J. Yang (United States/China) 25
Feng Zhang (China) 23
Haochen Zhang (China) 19
Ning Zhou (China) 21
Zhang Zuo (China) 20

Good luck to all ! !