Grand Piano: Upcoming Keyboard Concerts & Talks

By Troy Segal

If the sight and sound of someone tickling the ivories is your idea of musical heaven, rejoice: Fascinating concerts and events featuring the piano are coming up in NYC.

Image: me5otron — Flickr

Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America is the site of considerable upcoming keyboard action:

• In tribute to the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, Swedish pianist Per Tengstrand and U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson chat onstage about legendary statesman Dag Hammarskjöld—and Tengstrand performs pieces inspired by Markings, Hammarskjöld’s posthumously published diary of thoughts, notes, and poems, Jan. 15. A few weeks later, on Feb. 5, Tengstrand precedes a concert of Beethoven Piano Sonatas with a lecture on the composer’s rich middle period.

• Pianist Jeffrey Siegel leads a couple of keyboard concert/conversations, evenings featuring a talk, a performance and a Q-&-A session. The first, on Jan. 22, demonstrates the artistic kinship between Edvard Grieg and Frédéric Chopin. The second, on Mar. 12, is more of a musical grab-bag—including works by Schumann, Chopin, Fritz Kreisler and Carl Nielsen—of works that share one thing: a sense of exhilaration. Just the thing to herald spring.

Emanuel Ax performs Chopin (specifically, the Piano Concerto No. 2) with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall Jan. 28–31. Who could ask for anything more? How about some Pre-Concert Insights into the music, offered by composer/conductor Victoria Bond, who’s worked with everyone from Ray Charles to Leonard Slatkin.

An ensemble of Broadway musicians, the Pit Stop Players, pays homage to French pianist/composer Claude Bolling—who makes beautiful bedfellows out of jazz and classical music—in this concert. Bolling Night includes pieces by others who also fuse musical styles. Symphony Space, Feb. 9.

The Harlem Renaissance, the early 20th-century period when the quarter was a hotbed of innovative art, literature and music, lives again, as jazz pianist Orrin Evans leads his Captain Black Big Band in a swingin’ concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Feb. 20. The show will form A Musical Tribute to Thomas Hart Benton, whose massive mural America Today is on display at the museum.

(And for a review of a recent New York piano performance, click here.)