[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/piano keys edited.jpg” caption=”The 12th International Great Romantics Festival runs from Thursday, Oct. 5 to Saturday, Oct. 7. Photo courtesy Great Romantics Festival.”]More than 20 artists and speakers from several countries will take part in the 12th International Great Romantics Festival from Thursday, Oct. 5 to Saturday, Oct. 7.

Presented by the City of Hamilton, McMaster University's School of the Arts and the American Liszt Society, the event will celebrate the Golden Age of Music.

The Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra will perform an orchestral concert containing two works of enduring significance: Mendelssohn's “Scottish” Symphony and Max Bruchs “Scottish” Fantasy for solo violin and orchestra.

The concert will be conducted by Maestro Horst Foerster, who is based in Berlin and regularly occupies the podium of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. He will be making his fourth appearance at the Great Romantics Festival.

This year's first prize winner of the Hilton Head International Piano Competition, the young Ukrainian-Canadian pianist Dimitri Levkovich, will perform a demanding programme of works by Scriabin, Rachmaninov, and Chopin.

The rest of the festival will feature piano, lieder and organ recitals.

Of special interest will be the two Piano Galas, in which no fewer than 12 pianists will participate.

The first of them, “Homage to Mozart,” acknowledges the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, and presents four important concert paraphrases of Mozart's music by Franz Liszt.

The other Piano Gala, “On Wings of Song,” contains Liszt's piano transcriptions of songs by some of the composer's contemporaries, including Schumann, Chopin, Schubert, Robert Franz and Eduard Lassen.

The festival concludes with a banquet in Hamilton's Convention Centre.

For more information, please visit the Great Romantics Festival's website.