Spring Semester 2023 at the CCHK is packed full of events presenting our performance, teaching, and research on Cornell’s remarkable collection of keyboard instruments. From full length concerts and organ recitals to shorter lunchtime offerings and early evening salons, from early pianos to the Aeolian-Skinner organ, with faculty, students, and distinguished guest artists, our work runs the gamut of keyboard history and culture.
Highlights this term include guest recitals by concert organists Anne Laver (Anabel Taylor Chapel, February 3), whose program includes a new work by Syracuse-based composer Natalie Draper and Kola Owolabi (Sage Chapel, March 24), who brings to the Aeolian-Skinner organ the music of Franck and Vierne, as well as Calvin Hampton and Rachel Laurin. In February, CCHK Artist-in-Residence Mike Cheng-Yu Lee will give an all-Chopin recital on Cornell’s original Pleyel pianos in Barnes Hall (February 10); during an April residency (April 20–22), the legendary American pianist Gilbert Kalish will perform Charles Ives’s rarely heard First Piano Sonata and Otherworldly Resonances by George Crumb (d. 2022), who wrote much of his piano music for Kalish; and in May we will host a Chopin Mini-Academy (May 12–14) in collaboration with the Chopin Institute in Warsaw, that offers a weekend of masterclasses for visiting young artists, given by leading pianists and scholars from the US and Europe and featuring our superb 19th-century French pianos.
And to begin the semester, we welcome guest fortepianist Sezi Seskir and cellist Keiran Campbell for an intimate salon performance of the two cello sonatas written by Beethoven during his stay in Berlin in 1796 (January 27).
Spring 2023 promises to be a busy and rich semester. You are warmly invited to join us for any of these events, all of which are free and open to the public. For precise dates and program information, visit our current events webpage.
