CONCERTS Alexei Lubimov Mike Lee Tuija Hakkila Kristian Bezuidenhout

August 5–9, 2015
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Program | Pianos | Bios | Tickets | Accommodations

Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies presents five days of concerts, lectures, and master classes by fifty distinguished performers and scholars from around the world. With pianos from every period in the instrument’s three-hundred-year history, this event is a rare opportunity not to be missed!

Forte/Piano takes as its theme the rich variety inherent in the piano’s four-century history. The festival celebrates pianos from virtually every epoch of the instrument’s history, from a Florentine piano of the 1730s, through the late eighteenth-century Steins, Walters and Broadwoods, to the Grafs and Streichers and mid-nineteenth-century French Pleyels and Erards to the Steinway model of the 1870s and onwards.

At the heart of this festival is this musical conviction, expressed by Anton Rubinstein in 1892:

I think that instruments from every period have effects and colors that cannot be reproduced on today’s pianos—that compositions were always conceived with the instruments of their time in mind, and only on those can they achieve their full effect.

With repertoires ranging from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, the festival showcases the diverse opportunities for artistic expression, technical creativity, and musical learning that the multiplicity of instruments old and new offers pianists today.

Organizing Committee: Tom Beghin, Malcolm Bilson, David Breitman, Penelope Crawford, Roger Moseley, Annette Richards, and Andrew Willis.