The 21-year-old pianist Leo Gevisser is returning to perform the First Piano Concerto by Beethoven in the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra’s annual Huberts Rupert Memorial Concert. This will take place under the direction of the CPO’s principal guest conductor Bernhard Gueller at the Endler Concert Hall on Friday, December 1, at 19:30.
The CPO will also perform Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture and Mendelssohn’s Notturno from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his Symphony No. 4 in A, “Italian”. The concert takes place the night after he closes the CPO’s Summer Season at the City Hall in Cape Town.
Gevisser, whose partnership in 2022 with Gueller and the CPO in June last year in the 4th Rachmaninov Piano Concerto was a roof-raising success, is studying at the Juilliard School of Music in New York with Jerome Lowenthal. He was recently awarded the First Prize 2022 Miesczysław Munz Scholarship Competition. He was also invited to perform a solo recital as part of the Sparkill Recital Series in New York for both the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
Before moving to Cleveland in 2017 when he was 14, he had won first prizes in many prestigious national music competitions such as the SAMRO Hubert van der Spuy and Atterbury and had studied Nina Schumann and Luis Magalhaes,.In Cleveland in the Young Artists’ Programme of the Cleveland Institute of Music, he won more prizes and was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2019 Baltimore International Piano Festival Competition, which included a recital invitation at Weill Recital Hall NY in Summer 2020.
He gave his concerto debut at the age of 11 and went on to perform with all the orchestras in South Africa, several times with the CPO and last year undertook a national tour of South Africa with orchestras and in solo recital.
From the start of his musical career, he has continuously been involved with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra’s Masidlale grassroots project, an outreach programme teaching all orchestral instruments to underprivileged children in the townships around Cape Town. He has donated a portion of his performance fees to Masidlale since he was 13 years old.
Tickets for this concert, which is sponsored by the Rupert Music Foundation, are R150 including a glass of wine and are available from Artscape Dial-A-Seat 021 421 7695 and on the Computicket website here https://tickets.computicket.com/event/huberte_rupert_memorial_concert_/7232229/7232253/79836
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