A Letter from Svetlana Stolyarova
Music in the Garden
On 24 August 2014, before the Garden had even been built, the Russian Cultural Garden presented the first Grand Piano in the Russian Garden concert.
The photographs from that afternoon are not professional ones. They were taken quickly, by whoever had a camera, and we print them unaltered. Archives are not made of perfect images.
The Garden itself had not yet been built — the dedication was still ahead — and yet the music was already playing. We brought in a temporary stage, a full concert grand, and chairs for the audience, though many of them happily settled on the grass instead.
On 24 August 2014, the Russian Cultural Garden and the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation presented the first annual Grand Piano in the Russian Garden concert, on the site of the then future Russian Cultural Garden.
The hope from the beginning was that it would become another of the Gardens' lasting traditions, alongside Opera in the Italian Garden and the Liszt Festival in the Hungarian Garden.
The inaugural program had a theme: Music and Musicians of the Cultural Gardens of Cleveland. Thirteen busts of celebrated musicians stand in the various Gardens of Rockefeller Park, and the Hebrew Garden has its own Music Plaza — an entire musical geography within walking distance of itself.
Works by composers honored in the Cultural Gardens — Chopin of the Polish Garden, Liszt of the Hungarian — were performed by two brilliant Cleveland musicians, Dmitry Tyurin and Nara Avetisyan, both of the Cleveland Institute of Music, from the class of Sergey Babayan. And Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev — Second Prize and Russian Prize winner of the 2013 Cleveland International Piano Competition — gave a brilliant performance of Musical Moments by Rachmaninoff, the composer to be honored in the future Russian Cultural Garden.
The program, 24 August 2014
- Nara Avetisyan Liszt, Ballade no. 2 · Chopin, Ballade no. 4
- Dmitry Tyurin Liszt, Mephisto Waltz no. 1 · Tchaikovsky, Meditation, op. 72 no. 5
- Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev Rachmaninoff, Musical Moments nos. 2, 3 and 4
Free to the public, thanks to Winncom Technologies, Classic Pianos — Cleveland, MR Health Care, Our Home Adult Health Center, Alina Medical Supplies, Compellotech, and other businesses and families.
And here is Rachmaninoff himself, playing his own music, among photographs from his lifetime.
Today the tradition returns in a new form.
The Stars of Summer Laureates' Concert. With orchestra. At the Italian Cultural Garden. Sponsored by the Russian Cultural Garden.
Young musicians from around the world — some of them close to the age Nara and Arseny were in 2014 — will perform with a full orchestra on East Boulevard, in front of an audience many times the size of the one that sat on the grass twelve years ago.
The piano has moved a few gardens down the street. The audience has grown. There is an orchestra now. The name has changed.
The tradition did not end. It evolved.
The Laureates' Concert takes place on Sunday, August 30, 2026, at the Italian Cultural Garden, 990 East Boulevard, during One World Day. Young pianists, singers and dancers perform with orchestra. Admission is free; tickets, where offered, are for donations rather than for entry. Full details at TheStarsOfSummerUSA.com.
August People
Four Augusts, four births, one long habit of paying attention to ordinary things.
Isaac Levitan
Born 30 August 1860
The painter who found grandeur in a wet road, a grey sky, an alley of trees. He painted almost no faces. He did not need them.
Ilya Repin
Born 5 August 1844
The great portraitist of his century — of writers, of composers, of barge haulers on the Volga. He looked at everyone with the same seriousness.
Mikhail Zoshchenko
Born 10 August 1894
He wrote very short stories in the voice of ordinary people about very small things: a bathhouse, a coat, a neighbour. A century later they still land.
Alexander Grin
Born 23 August 1880
He invented a coastline that never existed and filled it with people waiting for something better. Readers have been going there ever since.
Miracles are made with our own hands.Alexander Grin, Scarlet Sails
There is no Levitan alley in our Garden, of course, no harbor of Grin’s, no communal apartment of Zoshchenko’s. But there is something that joins the culture they made to the very meaning of a Cultural Garden: a serious and careful regard for life and for creative work, for memory and for heritage. It is kept in different ways — in books and paintings, in music and monuments, in the work of volunteers, and simply in love for the Garden. In the end this is exactly what the Garden exists for: so that the memory of a culture stays part of our life today — through monuments, through events, through volunteering, and through the people to whom this Garden is dear.
Cleveland Curiosity
Three things about the ground we stand on.
It began with Shakespeare
The first of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens was the Shakespeare Garden, planted in 1916 to mark three hundred years since the playwright's death. Everything that followed along East Boulevard — more than thirty gardens, and still counting — grew out of that single plot.
A gift of a valley
The land the Gardens occupy came to the city as a gift. In the 1890s John D. Rockefeller donated the wooded ravine along Doan Brook that became Rockefeller Park — a green corridor running from University Circle down toward Lake Erie, with stone bridges arching over it.
One World Day is older than most of us
The Gardens' great annual festival dates to 1946 — begun in the first summer after the war, by a city full of people who had reason to want the word one in the name. Eight decades later, the Parade of Flags still opens it.
Around the Gardens
