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Over four days, the 2024 Honens Festival will feature the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin and Antonin Dvorak among others.
But John Kieser, president and CEO of Honens, would prefer not to pigeonhole the performances into a specific genre.
“I would not use the word classical,” says Kieser. “This is a music concert.”
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In fact, it’s eight music concerts held over four days at multiple venues. The Honens Festival may be best known for its international piano competition, which is held every three years and will next take place in 2025, but the performance side of the festival is held every year in fun spaces that often offer a looser environment than many classical music concerts.
Open Air Calgary, for instance, is a free event held at Central Memorial Park on Saturday that will have an all-star lineup that includes pianists Jon Kimura Parker, who is also artistic director of Honens, and Illia Ovcharenko, the Ukrainian wunderkind who won the Honens International Piano Competition in 2022. They will be joined by Houston-based quintet WindSync, which is made up of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn players. The program includes everything from works by Mexican composer Lorenzo Barcelata to movements from Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat Major for Piano and Winds. The same program will be repeated on Sunday afternoon for Open Air High River at George Lane Memorial Park. Both shows start at 2:30 p.m.
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“It’s going to be the most relaxed,” Kieser says. “It is fun, absolutely. It’s going to have a wide variety of music to please all palates. The outdoor concerts are where a lot of the stops are pulled out. We really go for it.”
Ovcharenko will have his own showcase on Friday at 7 p.m. at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church. That show is currently sold out, although there is a waitlist. The pianist’s program will be based around Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and will include John Corigiliano’s 1985 composition Fantasia on an Ostinato, which is based on the repetitive passage in the second movement of Symphony No. 7; followed by Robert Schumann’s Etudes in Variations Form on a Theme by Beethoven and concludes with Franz Liszt’s piano transcription of Symphony No. 7.
“Since he won in 2022, he’s become the complete artist,” says Kieser. “He is thinking about programming and doing it in an extremely thoughtful and sophisticated way. He is very aware of the audience and the audience experience.”
Later that night, Windsync and Parker will present Bison Noir: Centenary in Blue at the Royal Canadian Legion No. 1, which will feature Nicky Sohn’s A Night at Birdland and George Gershwin’s Three Preludes for piano, Summertime and Rhapsody in Blue.
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Pianists Parker, Ovcharenko, Zhenni Li-Cohen and Carmen Morin will present 176 Keys at the Chinook Centre on Thursday at 4 p.m. and Stephen Avenue Walk on Friday at 12:30 p.m., respectively. They will play a program that includes Debussy and Gershwin, among other composers.
There will be morning concerts at St. Stephens on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. and Sunday at YMCA Seton, which will also feature WindSync and is designed for younger audiences, neurodivergent listeners and people with disabilities.
Meanwhile, preparations are well underway for the 2025 Honens International Piano Competition 2025, with applications open until Oct. 30. The quarterfinals will be held March 2 to 4 in Berlin and March 17 to 19 in New York. The semifinals and finals will be held from Oct. 16 to 24, 2025 in Calgary. The competition offers Gold, Silver and Bronze Laureate prizes.
“There is a responsibility to competitors in terms of making sure they are fairly treated and have the best circumstances to compete, but after that how we work with them to become the complete artist,” Kieser says. “There is a whole raft of things we do and are rolling out and we’re increasing that in a significant way because a lot of these artists never get these kinds of skills. But we also have a responsibility to the art form and also the community.”
The Honens Festival 2024 takes place from Sept. 5 to 8 at various venues. Visit honens.com.
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