July in New York usually means muggy weather, very little breeze from my river view windows, and reflling my portable air-conditioner’s insatiable water tank.
 
For piano connoisseurs, July in New York means the International Keyboard Institute & Festival. Its 12th season opens July 18 and runs through August 1 at the Mannes College/New School for Music auditorium on 150 West 85th Street. This event always offers opportunities to hear talented emerging artists back-to-back with more established artists, many of whom do not often get to play recitals in New York.

Ten 6pm Prestige Series recitals are respectively given over to young up-and-comers Hinrich Alpers, Ying Feng, Jue Wang, Winav Yarden, Minsoo Sohn, Alexander Moutouzkine, Allesandro Taverna, Michail Lifits, Mariangela Vacatello, and Di Wu. For some sneak previews, go to YouTube, where most young pianists promote themselves, as they should. Check out, for example, Jue Wang’s bouncy and cocksure Tchaikovsky/Pabst Polonaise from Eugene Onegin. Or this slashing, intense rendition of Ravel’s La Valse with Alexander Moutouzkine. 
 
The 8:30pm Masters Series features festival founder and artistic director Jerome Rose on opening night. Over the past decade or so, Rose has been setting down his core repertoire for the Medici Classics label. I’ve reviewed some of these titles in Gramophone, and his website offers quite a few DVDs, CDs and digital downloads, including rare titles from the seventies and eighties unavailable otherwise. The download prices are super reasonable; a measly dollar well get you Rose’s old Vox recording of the Ferdinand Hiller and Mihaly Mosonyi piano concertos.

Two past Van Cliburn competition Gold Medalists have programs to themselves: Alexander Kobrin on July 30 and Olga Kern on July 31. So does one of the most undervalued pianists around, Jeffrey Swann, July 21. Jeffrey is sort of like a contemporary Egon Petri, in that he doesn’t chase the limelight, the limelight doesn’t chase him, he just sits and plays with absolutely no effort at all, and he can play anything, as you’ll see here.

The July 24/5 weekend stands as the festival’s epicenter. Saturday 24th offers an all-day centenary tribute to Leonard Shure, with master classes, a two-hour survey of SHure’s recorded legacy (when will someone reissue his Vox and Epic traversals of the Beethoven Diabelli Variations?), and a summit meeting of former Shure pupils Ursula Oppens, David Del Tredici, Victor Rosenbaum, Beth Levin, Pillip Moll, Seth Knopp and Rose himself.
 
On Sunday the 25, festival mainstay pianist/writer/radio host David Dubal celebrates the late, great Earl Wild (a long time IKIF favorite) at 1pm, followed at 3pm by what should be a colorful and insightful interview with Gary Graffman (Coincidentally, Arkivmusic.com’s on-demand reprint program has restored some of this pianist’s long-out-of-print stereo RCA Victor releases).
 
As if these two events weren’t enough, two concerts at 6 and 8:30 showcase a whole slew of Mannes faculty members. I’ll list the ones I know best.

There’s Michael Oelbaum, who ought to record much more than he should – he made a wonderful Diabelli Variations disc more than 20 years ago. Steven Mayer is an old friend, for whom I transcribed Art Tatum solos back in the days before computers could do such work. Mykola Suk I first met through our mutual friend composer/pianist/conductor Virko Baley, although I had reviewed several of his discs earlier (positively, thank goodness!). He’s a great Liszt player, among other things, and he gave me a ten-second piano lesson that got me out of a serious fingering jam. And Magdalena Baczewska recently came out with a beautiful, intimately scaled recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
 
Hopefully I’ll report further on these events as they happen. Meantime, keep cool.