Pianist

Rain didn't stop "Saturday Night Live" jazz pianist Tuffus Zimbabwe from entertaining a crowd at "Jazz on the Fort" in Roxbury on Sunday. The annual Berklee College of Music concert, which takes place on Fort Hill, had been postponed a week because of the weather, but this time around, the show went on despite the drizzle. Tuffus - a Berklee grad who happens to be from Fort Hill - was able to play for his neighbors and his Fort Hill family, including his dad, Jomo . Tuffus was hired to play with the "SNL" band last year.

Turkey's state-run news agency says a prosecutor has proposed charging an internationally known Turkish pianist and composer with insulting Islamic religious values in comments he made on Twitter. Anadolu Agency said Friday that an Istanbul court will decide whether to accept the proposed indictment against Fazil Say, who has played piano with the New York Philharmonic, Berliner Symphoniker, Israel Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, and Tokyo Symphony. The prosecutor accuses 42-year-old Say of inciting hatred and public enmity, and insulting "religious values.

Murray Perahia's artistry has undergone something of a transformation since the pianist battled a hand injury during the 1990s. Where his playing was once marked chiefly by understated elegance, more recent performances and recordings have showed a musician dialed in to his more volatile, Romantic side. When Perahia holds both sides of his personality in balance, as he often did at Sunday's recital, he is a remarkably complete and compelling pianist. He opened with the first Partita of Bach, a composer who has been at the center of his repertoire over the last decade.

Art, jewelry and furnishings collected by the pianist Van Cliburn has fetched over $4.3 million at an auction in New York City. Christie's auction house says Thursday's sale featured more than 150 items including English furniture, Russian art, silver and jewels. The highlight of the sale was a pair of George II giltwood mirrors attributed to Mathias Lock. They were sold for over $464,000. They had been estimated to bring between $150,000 and $250,000. The price includes the buyer's premium.

Hung-Kuan Chen is back in prime technical form after years of struggle following an injury, but those years have made him a different pianist, and a better one. Twenty years ago, Chen was one of the top-ranked young pianists in the world, a prize-winner in international competitions, winner of a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and a guest soloist with major orchestras. But in 1992 an accident with a ladder caused neurological damage to his right hand, which led to a condition called focal dystonia; doctors told him he could not expect to play again.

Worcester-born pianist Al Vega has only semi-retired from the Boston jazz universe he helped launch nearly 70 years ago, when he began jamming with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday to Betty Carter and Stan Getz at long-vanished clubs that remain only in the mists of memory. Unlike those crumbled edifices of brick and mortar, the flesh-and-blood Vega is still behind his Yamaha piano, still performing three nights a week around Boston, still discovering -- and championing -- fresh talent, and still coaching Babe Ruth League baseball in Everett.

Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt has had a long and active career as a soloist, yet until this past Sunday, she had yet to play in Boston. Her belated introduction to the city came courtesy of the Celebrity Series of Boston. Hewitt is known principally as a Bach performer, but she is in some ways an unusual one. Most current Bach players favor a kind of dry pointillism; Hewitt plays with great fluidity and grace. The first phrase of Bach's English Suite No. 6 spun out languidly, as if suspended in space.

Turkey's state-run news agency says a prosecutor has proposed charging an internationally known Turkish pianist and composer with insulting Islamic religious values in comments he made on Twitter. Anadolu Agency said Friday that an Istanbul court will decide whether to accept the proposed indictment against Fazil Say, who has played piano with the New York Philharmonic, Berliner Symphoniker, Israel Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, and Tokyo Symphony. The prosecutor accuses 42-year-old Say of inciting hatred and public enmity, and insulting...

NEW YORK -- Wally Harper, a pianist, musical director, and composer who had accompanied singer Barbara Cook since her 1975 comeback concert at Carnegie Hall, died Oct. 8 in Manhattan. He was 63. The cause was cardiac arrest, said his partner, Allan Gruet. Mr. Harper began working on Broadway in 1969 with the short-lived musical "Billy," for which he wrote incidental music and was assistant conductor. He arranged dance music for a string of productions in the 1970s, including Stephen Sondheim's "Company" and revivals of "Irene" and "Peter Pan. " Mr. Harper was already a...

CAMBRIDGE -- Fred Hersch has been hailed as "a poet of a pianist" by no less an authority than The New Yorker's longtime critic Whitney Balliett. Though Hersch was influenced by such seminal jazzmen as Billy Strayhorn and Thelonious Monk, the jazziest thing about him is his firm commitment to improvisation. His playing bears traces of everything from classical music to folk-rock, and he has composed a song cycle based on Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass. " Friday night, at the Regattabar, Hersch opened with a medley honoring two lesser-known forebears: Chet Baker's pianist Russ...

Fred Hersch first read the earthy transcendentalist verse of Walt Whitman as an undergraduate at New England Conservatory in the mid-1970s, an encounter that made an indelible impression on the rapidly blossoming jazz pianist. But it wasn't until some two decades later in the midst of a French tour that he inexplicably found himself drawn again to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass. " That Parisian experience led directly to the creation of his soaring song cycle "Leaves of Grass," which he brings to Jordan Hall on Thursday for the work's Boston premiere.

The Austrian pianist Till Fellner had planned to spend all of 2012 on sabbatical, forgoing public performance altogether in order to devote himself to pursuits musical and nonmusical. Yet when an invitation to perform with Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony was extended, "I decided to make an exception," says Fellner from his home in Vienna. They will collaborate next week in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, K.482, renowned among the composer's concertos for its colorful wind writing.

Croatian pianist Martina Filjak assembled a daunting program for her recital at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Sunday afternoon: Mozart's Sonata No. 13, Liszt's Ballade No. 2, Schumann's "Faschingsschwank aus Wien," and Prokofiev's Sonata No. 2. The pieces were technically demanding, especially the Liszt and the Prokofiev. But the greater challenge was to embrace the four composers' very different sensibilities. Filjak didn't entirely succeed in that, though she grew in strength as the afternoon went on. As she showed last November, when she played Brahms's First...

Citing health reasons, the Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini has withdrawn from all of his upcoming American engagements, including a Celebrity Series recital scheduled for April 22 in Symphony Hall. That concert has now been canceled. According to the Celebrity Series announcement: "Ticket holders will be notified of options to exchange, take a credit on their accounts or donate tickets. Patrons may also request a refund. Ticket holders are requested to retain their tickets until they receive notification.

FIDDLE WITH LOCAL FLAVOR: "Fiddle and Folk Music in the Sanctuary" will be presented at the Winchester Unitarian Society on Friday. Fiddler and singer LissaSchneckenburger, along with guitarist Bethany Waickman and accordion player Dan Gurney, perform new and traditional New England dance tunes. Raised in a small town in Maine, Schneckenburger began playing fiddle at age 6. She soon went on to study with fiddler Greg Boardman and play with the Maine Country Dance Orchestra.

The following was submitted by Tufts University: The Tufts University Department of Music presents saxophonist Philipp Stäudlin and pianist Yoko Hagino performing works by Denisov, Schmitt, Bassett, and more in the Distler Performance Hall at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at 3 p.m. as part of the Sunday at Tufts — Community Concert Series. The Granoff Music Center is located at 20 Talbot Avenue on Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus.

WALTHAM - "Cellotica" is Joshua Gordon's title for a planned series of concerts exploring neglected works for cello. Sunday's concert at Brandeis University, subtitled "French Connections," was its first entry. But Gordon, the Lydian String Quartet's cellist, didn't simply collect a miscellany of French pieces for himself and pianist Randall Hodgkinson to play. Instead, they offered four distinctive and challenging works touched in varying ways by the spirit, sound, and techniques of French music - a series of musical postcards from disparate points on its terrain.

The Austrian pianist Till Fellner had planned to spend all of 2012 on sabbatical, forgoing public performance altogether in order to devote himself to pursuits musical and nonmusical. Yet when an invitation to perform with Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony was extended, "I decided to make an exception," says Fellner from his home in Vienna. They will collaborate next week in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, K.482, renowned among the composer's concertos for its colorful wind writing.

CAMBRIDGE - In his centennial year, John Cage has come into his own, at least at MIT: A standing-room-only crowd packed Killian Hall on Monday for a performance of Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes" by pianist Vicky Chow. The 70-minute cycle - 16 sonatas interspersed with four interludes - was Cage's first major masterpiece, one of the most singular piano works of the modern era. Composed between 1946 and 1948, "Sonatas and Interludes" was Cage's largest essay for his own invention: the prepared piano.

EVENTS Waltham : The 16th annual New England Model Engineering Show will showcase a wide variety of working creations fashioned on a smaller scale, including steam, gasoline, aircraft, and Stirling cycle engines, clocks, and model boats, Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, 154 Moody St. Admission $7; $5 children, students, and seniors; under 6, military, and CRMI members free. 781-893-5410, www.crmi.org. MUSIC Brookline : The Lavazza Chamber Ensemble - violinists Kristina Nilsson and Paula Oakes, violist France Pfeiffer-Rios,...