Classical music will merge with country western history as the Cliburn Sessions head to the Historic Fort Worth Stockyards for its 2024-25 season.
The signature series, which brings classical music into casual settings, will head to Tannahill’s Tavern & Music Hall for a series of four performances — marking the first time the Cliburn has produced a ticketed concert in the Stockyards.
Celebrity chef Tim Love owns the music venue as well as several other popular restaurants in Fort Worth. Cliburn President and CEO Jacques Marquis described the move as “cowboys and culture at its finest” in a press release announcing the season.
“This kind of partnership is exactly what Fort Worth is about,” he said.
The season will kick off Oct. 16 with a performance by 26-year-old Joseph Parrish, a Baltimore native and bass-baritone singer, and end March 26 with violinists Simone Porter and Blake Pouliot joining forces with pianist Hsin-I Huang.
Stephen Hough, who served as a juror and composed the commissioned work for the 2022 Cliburn competition, will perform Jan. 29, while artists Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane will team up for a Nov. 12 performance. Shaw has composed work for celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma and had her music featured in Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” and the Netflix TV series “Maid.” Kahane has worked with artists Paul Simon and Phoebe Bridgers in addition to earning commissions from Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
When introducing the Cliburn Sessions’ inaugural season in the spring of 2014, Marquis described it as a way to present classical music in a causal environment that allows the artists to bend genres and interact with the audience.
“It’s an intimate, cool environment—and will allow us to bring even more great talent to Fort Worth,” Maquis said at the time. “Many of these musicians may venture outside of the classical idiom during the course of the concert—into jazz, pop, world, alternative. In the hands of exceptional artists, good music is good music.”
The series is an outgrowth of the world-renowned Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which draws its namesake from the celebrated Fort Worthian who did what many believed was impossible at the time and won the inaugural 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
Impressed by his ability to overcome the long odds for an American pianist, Irl Allison, the founder of the National Guild of Piano Teachers, had the idea to host a piano competition in Cliburn’s honor and offered $10,000 to the first place winner.
In the subsequent six decades, the competition has launched the careers of many young pianists, most recently 2022 gold medalist Yunchan Lim of South Korea.
The causal concert season will wrap up ahead of the 17th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which will return to the world stage May 21, 2025 at TCU’s Van Cliburn Concert Hall and Bass Performance Hall.
Marcheta Fornoff covers arts and culture for the Fort Worth Report. Reach her at marcheta.fornoff@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.