File photo by Peter Morenus/University Photography

The "Cornell Seven," shown in 1994, will reunite Aug. 8 for a concert during the “Forte/Piano” festival, with Malcolm Bilson, right, and his former students (clockwise from left) Tom Beghin, Bart van Oort, David Breitman, Zvi Meniker, Andrew Willis and Ursula Dütschler.

Provided

Piano builder Paul McNulty, and two replica instruments he designed, will be featured during the “Forte/Piano” festival.

The Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies will present “Forte/Piano: A Festival Celebrating Pianos in History,” five days of concerts, lectures and workshops that illuminate the complexity of the instrument, Aug. 5-9 on campus.

“Pianos, like cars, come in all makes, shapes and colors, for all kinds of purposes and tastes. It makes sense to value that variety,” says pianist David Kim ’03. “No one would expect everybody to drive the same car.” 

Since its invention at the beginning of the 18th century, the piano has evolved in changing contexts, in the home and on the concert stage. Piano builders have competed to define and transform the kinds of sound a piano produces. With replicas and originals from virtually every epoch of the instrument’s history, the festival showcases opportunities that instruments old and new offer pianists today.

More than 60 performers, scholars, instrument builders and piano technicians from around the world will come together to share their passion with the public and exchange new ideas. Their repertoire ranges from favorites by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to works seldom heard in concert halls.

Visiting lecturer Blaise Bryski will lead a workshop for young pianists, open to the public the morning of Aug. 5. The festival program also includes morning lectures and lecture-recitals by noted scholars, and afternoon demonstrations by piano builders and performers, appearing side-by-side to give a sense of what piano makers of the past strove for.

A two-part concert Aug. 8 will reunite the “Cornell Seven,” who two decades ago gave the very first live performance of all 32 Beethoven sonatas on period instruments. The seven pianists are professor emeritus of music Malcolm Bilson and his former students Tom Beghin, DMA ’96; David Breitman, M.A. ’90, Ph.D. ’93; Ursula Dütschler; Zvi Meniker, DMA ’01; Bart van Oort, M.A. ’90, DMA ’93; and Andrew Willis, DMA ’94.

What emerged from their performances, the New York Timeswrote in 1994, “was an unusually clear sense of how revolutionary [Beethoven’s] works must have sounded in their time.”

The 11 festival concerts also include evening recitals by two international pianists: Kristian Bezuidenhout, performing works by C.P.E. Bach and Mozart; and Alexei Lubimov, playing works by Debussy, Satie and Stravinsky. Bezuidenhout and Lubimov also will lead master classes.

In the closing concert Aug. 9, pianists Matthew Bengtson and Tuija Hakkila will perform a program celebrating the 100th anniversary of Alexander Scriabin’s death and the 150th birthday of Jean Sibelius.

More information and tickets are available at http://westfield.org/festival.

The Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies is based at Cornell and serves as a national resource for the advancement of keyboard music.

Damien Mahiet is program coordinator for the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies at Cornell.