Piano Concert: Leonard Bernstein & Friends

The ivories of the Cranbrook House Steinway & Sons concert grand piano have been tickled by many legendary pianists, including the American composer Leonard Bernstein. Join Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research and Cranbrook House and Gardens Auxiliary in celebrating the Auxiliary’s recent restoration of the piano--a year-long, $40,000 project--with a concert by the equally legendary pianist James Tocco.

The concert will include an excerpt from Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, which Bernstein remembered composing on the Steinway while in residence at Cranbrook in the spring of 1946. The program, which also includes compositions by Bernstein’s friends and contemporaries such as George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, will be introduced with remarks about the piano and its restoration by Center Director Gregory Wittkopp and remarks about Bernstein and his compositions by Tocco.

A Detroit native, James Tocco is Founding Artistic Director of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Eminent Scholar/Artist-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, and former Professor of Piano at the Musikhochschule in Lübeck, Germany. Among Tocco’s most treasured experiences is the day he met with Leonard Bernstein at Bernstein’s home in Fairfield, Connecticut, where they played a “four-hand” piano arrangement of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Leonard Bernstein & Friends Piano Concert will be held in Cranbrook House Library on Sunday, June 7. The concert will begin at 4:00 pm, there will be a reception to meet James Tocco (with hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar) at 5:00 pm. Admission is $75 per person and includes a $40 tax-deductible donation. Pre-paid reservations can be made by calling 248.645.3149 or online at http://housegardens.cranbrook.edu.