By Frank Dabbs

When Kati Gleiser performs this weekend at the Sweetwater Music Festival followers of Owen Sound's favorite musical hometown daughter will hear a new level of maturity.
Dr. Murray Cathcart and his wife Ruth have mentored the concert pianist.
"A musician requires four things," said Dr. Cathcart.
"Talent, capacity for musicianship and interpretation, the ability to labor for six or seven hours often more in the practice room, and owning the stage.
"Kati has all those attributes.
"And she has reached a new level of maturity in the past year."
Ruth said, "It is in the stars that she will be a great one."
Kati thinks of her "music as an avocation, not in an egotistical sense but as an offering she gives to her audience," said Mark Fewer the artistic director of Sweetwater.
Pharmacist Maureen Sutherland, past chair of the Georgian Bay Symphony, said, "Kati is charismatic.
"As a scientist I resist the idea of "channeling", however Kati channels the composers she plays. I don't know how else to describe it," Sutherland said.
Kati "embodies the music she plays," Fewer said.
"Classical music demands an uncountable number of hours alone in a practice room.
"It is easy to become self-absorbed and to bring that self-absorption to the stage. That is not the kind of musician I want to play with and it is not Kati," Fewer said.
"I feel music chose me in the truest sense of those words," said Kati, who began to play when she was four.
"Music has spoken to me directly from the vast centuries of European language and influence.
"I've been able to be closer to the greatness of Beethoven, the raw power of Schumann, the depths of Brahms' emotional life, the color and sensuality of Debussy's experience."
Kati grew up in Owen Sound and this spring earned a doctorate from the prestigious Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
Her father, Dick Gleiser, taught art at OSCVI until he retired and her mother, Judy, was an elementary school teacher in the city.
Kati returned this summer to play at the Kincardine Music Festival in a solo concert, as accompanist and in a piano quartet.
She also did a concert in the Wednesday noon summer series at Georgian Shores United Church (formerly Division Street), and in Markdale.
She is well know locally as a guitarist, folk singer, composer, improviser, song writer and visual artist.
Gabriel Martins, an international award-winning cellist and Kati's fellow student at Indiana University has played with Kati frequently.
"She despises the word "accompanist", and for good reason, Gabriel said.
"In performance as well as practice, the pianist and cellist come together, and produce a magnificent world of sound, and artistry.
"Sometimes, when the score calls for it, the pianist is "supporting" the cellist, and sometimes the other way around," said Gabriel.
"It is a constant interaction between the two players, and Kati does that to a greater effect than anyone I have ever seen, or worked with.
"The product of this is a sort of "musician high", of one heart, one pulse, and one vision, Gabriel explained.
Kati will be one of the musicians playing at the Hayden and Beethoven Sweetwater concert Saturday evening at St. Andrews church.
She will also do a pay-what-you-can concert at the Roxy Theatre at noon Sunday and teach at the master's classes on Saturday morning at St. Andrews.
Appearing at Sweetwater this weekend as well as Kati and Mark Fewer are Baroque violinist Elizabeth Wallsfisch, soprano Meredith Hall, jazz pianist David Braid and the St. Lawrence String Quartet.