Johannes Müller Stosch, conductor  

Mikhail Korzhev, piano 

West Ottawa Performing Arts Center

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AUDIENCE CHOICE 2026 

BONDS Montgomery Variations 

MARX Romantic Piano Concerto 

Audience Choice: Help us choose the opening piece for this concert!  Look for details in fall, 2025.  After studying piano and composition with Florence Price in Chicago, Margaret Bonds composed her variations in the wake of the 1963 firebombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church. She describes them as “a group of freestyle variations based on the Negro Spiritual theme; I want Jesus to Walk with Me. The treatment suggests the manner in which Bach constructed his partitas – a bold statement of the theme, followed by variations of the theme.” A profound lyricist and yearning optimist, Austrian composer Joseph Marx considered himself a musical poet of happiness.  HSO Music Director Johannes Müller Stosch describes his 1919 Romantic Piano Concerto as “the Austrian counterpart of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, with lush romantic melodies, harmonies, and plenty of technical fireworks for the soloist.”  The piece was resurrected and made popular by famed pianist Jorge Bolet, is a rarely performed gem melding orchestra with piano in a duet of energy and radiant lyricism.  

Mikhail Korzzev is one of the few pianists of this generation who has the boldness, technique, and strength to take on Marx’s Romantic Piano Concerto.  He “projects strength, atmosphere and the ability to tangle even the knottiest passages…” (International Record Review)

HSO Subscribers and donors will receive their season ticket renewal packets and brochures in mid-May 2025. Single tickets will go on-sale on August 1, 2025.