Piano

Pianist Christopher Taylor is not someone to do things halfway. At the Gardner in 2002 he played Olivier Messiaen's epic cycle "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus" from memory. On Friday he took on all the piano etudes of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. He brought off this exceedingly taxing program with buoyancy and verve, giving further proof of his singular talents. Ligeti's ongoing series of etudes -- the first book was published in 1985, the third is still being written -- form the most important body of piano music of the last 50 years.

RE "DROP kicks: MIT students set to reaffirm law of gravity — with baby grand piano" (Metro, April 25): What will it be next? Book burning? Tossing a baby grand piano from a roof for the fun of it seems barbaric to me. Aren't our educational institutions meant to impart knowledge and the value of our culture? Jinx Nolan Belmont

Wanted: pianos to be played at bus stops, parks, general stores and other places in parts of New Hampshire and Vermont. To celebrate its 50th anniversary season, the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College is sponsoring a piano "street project. " Vermont Public Radio reports (http://bit.ly/AmyJj3) the center is looking for old, upright pianos. The idea is create works of art for the public. Agreements are in place with multiple towns, businesses and property owners to place pianos around Upper Valley in July, including Ledyard Bridge connecting Hanover, N.H., to Norwich,...

It is one of the highlights of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that only lasts a few seconds. Residents of an MIT dorm dropped an upright piano from their roof Thursday to celebrate the last day students can drop classes without having them appear on their college transcript. About 200 onlookers watched as the piano crashed into a second piano, a baby grand, positioned on the ground six stories below for a better smash. People scrambled for souvenir pieces — keys, hammers, strings and splinters.

Police say an unloaded gun has been found inside a piano that was donated to a southeast Michigan nursing home years ago. AnnArbor.com reports ( http://bit.ly/xWHdtA) that staff at Whitehall Healthcare Center in Pittsfield Township, 5 miles south of Ann Arbor, found the gun Friday in a case inside the piano. Pittsfield Township deputy police chief Gordy Schick says he suspects the Ruger .22 caliber pistol was hidden long before the musical instrument was donated to the home.

MIAMI — The baby grand piano that turned up on a Miami sandbar was burned to tatters by New Year’s revelers, then brought to its new home by a television designer’s teenage son, who said yesterday that he hoped the idea might help him get into a prestigious art school. And now, it has been removed. Captain John Nicholson of Biscayne Towing and Salvage said the piano was taken away but did not give details. Florida wildlife officials had wanted it gone within 24 hours and warned that if it were not removed, the teen and his parents could face felony dumping charges.

CAMBRIDGE - Charlie Bruno was, by all accounts, the one guy in his college dormitory who would do just about anything on a lark. On the MIT campus during the anything-goes early 1970s, he was one of the first to go streaking. He once built a homemade rocket and shot it into the Charles River, friends say. But it was his piano work that still resounds at Baker House, the iconic Massachusetts Institute of Technology dormitory along Memorial Drive. Not that he played, rather, in November 1972, Bruno decided it would be hugely entertaining to heave an unplayable old upright off...

It takes courage to offer a program of music for violin and piano by Francis Poulenc, Charles Ives, and George Enescu, as the Weilerstein Duo did in their free concert at Jordan Hall Monday evening. And greater courage still to choose works born in bleak times. Ives's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 was composed during World War I, Enescu's "Impressions d'enfance" and Poulenc's Sonata for Violin and Piano during World War II. Violinist Donald Weilerstein and pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein - who with their daughter, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, make up the Weilerstein Trio...

CAMBRIDGE -- The music department of Harvard University has reconfigured the annual concert series by the Fromm Players into a mini-festival that will expand rather than duplicate the work of the city's many excellent resident new-music groups. The first festival was curated by the composer Joshua Fineberg, and the subject of investigation was the evolution of the concerto and the soloist in late 20th-century music. The classic on Friday's program was one of the milestone works in the career of Elliott Carter: the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano...

It's piano week at Berklee College of Music, which means free and inexpensive concerts. Highlights include the JoAnne Brackeen Quartet on Monday night at 7 at the David Friend Recital Hall, and Toshiko Akiyoshi , solo and in a trio, on Thursday at the Berklee Performance Center. Meanwhile in the clubs: tonight and tomorrow night, guitarist Earl Klugh cools off Scullers Jazz Club. On Tuesday, also at Scullers, Steve Smith & Buddy's Buddies tip their hat to the legendary drummer Buddy Rich.

CAMBRIDGE - Charlie Bruno was, by all accounts, the one guy in his college dormitory who would do just about anything on a lark. On the MIT campus during the anything-goes early 1970s, he was one of the first to go streaking. He once built a homemade rocket and shot it into the Charles River, friends say. But it was his piano work that still resounds at Baker House, the iconic Massachusetts Institute of Technology dormitory along Memorial Drive. Not that he played, rather, in November 1972, Bruno decided it would be hugely entertaining to heave an unplayable old upright off the sixth-floor...

Over the past 50 years, Meredith Monk has been a dancer, a composer, an installation artist, and a film and theater director, in the process collecting three Obie Awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. You'd hardly expect a mere piano or two to do her justice - especially since her primary instrument as a composer has always been the human voice. Yet Thursday evening at Jordan Hall, the New England Conservatory paid tribute to Monk with a program of her complete piano music, and her extraordinary sensibility expressed itself as fully as if she had been on stage herself.

Meredith Monk's art is gloriously unclassifiable. Over the course of a career that stretches back to the 1960s, her artistic activity has included composing, singing, creating dances, making films, and theatrical directing. But at least over the last decade, Monk has increasingly devoted herself to the creation and performance of music. She has broadened her musical horizon outward from her fascination with the human voice and composed both instrumental pieces and works that unite vocals and instruments in novel ways.

The following was submitted by Tufts University: The Tufts University Department of Music presents an evening of new works by Tufts and Boston-area composers entitled Modern Majesty: New Works for Tenor, Horn, and Piano in the Distler Performance Hall at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center on Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 8 p.m. The concert will feature the Boston premiere of Wasserabstieglieder (Songs Descending into Water)...

The piano trio is the most basic of jazz combos, but it is also one that provides an enormous amount of freedom and an infinite number of possibilities. The trios helmed by Art Tatum and Bill Evans were at the polar extremes of mainstream jazz, but who wouldn't rank them among the greatest of all time? Today we have trios as diverse as Keith Jarrett's and The Bad Plus, but they are so different that you wouldn't play their music at the same dinner party. One is tempted to say we are in a renaissance period of the piano trio, but we are always in a...

Police say an unloaded gun has been found inside a piano that was donated to a southeast Michigan nursing home years ago. AnnArbor.com reports ( http://bit.ly/xWHdtA) that staff at Whitehall Healthcare Center in Pittsfield Township, 5 miles south of Ann Arbor, found the gun Friday in a case inside the piano. Pittsfield Township deputy police chief Gordy Schick says he suspects the Ruger .22 caliber pistol was hidden long before the musical instrument was donated to the home.

. PIANOMANIA Directed by: Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis At: Kendall Square Running time: 93 minutes In German, with English subtitles Unrated Last October, “Pianomania’’ had a limited run at the Museum of Fine Arts. This is a condensed version of the review that ran then. Stefan Knupfer tunes pianos for Steinway & Sons. He’s actually a master technician. But a large part of what makes “Pianomania’’ a successful portrait of his skill is that it undersells him, too. Knupfer works primarily with the best in concert pianism.

Experimental Moodswing Orchestra Moodswing Orchestra El Destructo ESSENTIAL “Sweet Adelaide’’ Moodswing Orchestra (with an altered lineup) plays at the Lizard Lounge on Thursday. Sounds arrive in this order, layering on top of one another: the gentle tinkling of piano keys. Radio static. Bowed strings. A slow, insistent drum beat. A whispered chant. A lovely female voice enters - it belongs to Joan Wasser - and weaves around the rhythm.

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.

Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello aside, the chamber repertoire for cello is not brimming with household names. It's no surprise that Yo-Yo Ma has been in crossover mode for years now. Or that for his Celebrity Series recital at Jordan Hall Friday evening with pianist Paolo Giacometti, Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey raided the violin-and-piano repertoire for the better part of the duo's engaging, high-strung performance. Wispelwey treats his instrument like a business partner, showing much respect but little obvious affection.