The Bay Area has never suffered from a shortage of piano recitals. The schedules of all the major local music presenters are studded with solo appearances by everyone from the world’s leading keyboard virtuosos to up-and-coming young talents.

What it hasn’t had until relatively recently, though, is a dedicated piano festival, an extended celebration of the art and technique of this central instrumental tradition.

That’s how Jeffrey LaDeur found things in 2017 when the idea for the San Francisco International Piano Festival came to him.

“I saw an opportunity and a need,” the San Francisco pianist said. “We have an incredibly rich piano community here, but I think that sometimes it’s not that cohesive.

“It seemed strange to me that there wouldn’t be a piano festival in such a major arts city, where there are in places that are far smaller.”

So LaDeur got to work raising money and arranging events. The result of his efforts: a two-week series of solo recitals at a variety of venues in San Francisco and the East Bay, offering a side-by-side showcase for established artists and new talents alike.

That model has persisted essentially unchanged into the festival’s current iteration, which gets underway Friday, Aug. 18, with a recital at Old First Church by the young California pianist Tanya Gabrielian.

节日结束时,它将sponsored appearances by Parker Von Ostrand (a current student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music), Italian pianist Alvise Pascucci, and LaDeur himself. The final event, on Aug. 26, features Bay Area luminary Stephen Prutsman performing music by Rachmaninoff and presenting his original chamber score to accompany a screening of Buster Keaton’s silent film classic “College.”

“I have to say that the festival pretty much started off in the form it takes now,” LaDeur said. “For better or worse, we didn’t really ramp up at all. It was always, you know, 10 or 12 events in a short amount of time.”

Still, there has been one notable addition to the lineup. With funding from San Francisco’s Ross McKee Foundation, which helps sponsor piano events throughout the Bay Area, the festival last year began offering a series of public master classes with leading piano pedagogues.

本赛季的一个类将由沙龙Mann, a longtime fixture of the Bay Area’s piano landscape who is on the Conservatory faculty. Mann’s impromptu demonstration at last year’s festival of how to find a wealth of detail within a few measures of a Bach prelude — caught on video and subsequently posted to YouTube — became a viral hit, at least within the world of classical piano.

“A master class is a peculiar event,” Mann said. “It’s kind of like having a blind date onstage.

“It’s not a lesson, so there’s a limit to how much detail you can get into. You only have about two minutes to decide what to tackle with the student, and some of it has to address the audience. It’s an incredible hybrid.”

Another master class slated for this year’s festival features Kathleen Riley. She maintains a dual career as a pianist and a specialist in optimal performance biofeedback, which she uses to help train pianists to improve their posture and other physical habits.

“They discovered in the mid-1980s, and this hasn’t really changed that much, that pianists had a 75% rate of misuse or overuse,” Riley said. “That means things like tendinitis, tennis elbow, carpal tunnel, rotator cuff injuries — all sorts of things that really come from a lack of proper knowledge of how the body has to work with the instrument.

“Pianists are not looked at as athletes, but we are. We are athletes of the fine muscles. And yet our traditional way of teaching has not been the way we approach teaching sports.”

In addition to the master classes, the Ross McKee Foundation has been a stalwart supporter of the festival overall, which LaDeur says operates on an annual budget of just $50,000.

“The festival has become a favorite of our board over the past three or four years,” said McKee Executive Director Nicholas Pavkovic. “A lot of the time, we’re supporting a random piano recital on a community music series, which is nice — but it’s nicer to be able to support something like this that is completely dedicated to the piano.”

Pavkovic sees the festival’s emphasis on young and undiscovered artists as a boon for pianists and audiences alike.

“It’s wonderful to hear the new talent. I hear this over and over from people, that there’s something better about this than only going to performances by established pianists. They get a freshness of approach, and a selection of pianists that would not otherwise appear in the Bay Area.”

That’s a reflection of LaDeur’s method of scouting and recruiting for the festival.

“The artists I’m looking for are reaching far beyond a box of strings and hammers,” he said. “There’s a certain kind of approach that involves piano playing for its own sake, and that’s not terribly interesting to me.

“I have a great fascination with the way a person’s personality and experience and interests can match their style on the piano. I love the way all those different voices can come through the same instrument.”

Like all performing arts organizations, the San Francisco International Piano Festival took an enforced hiatus from live performances during the COVID-19 shutdown of 2020, offering a series of online recitals instead. LaDeur counts that as “Season 4.5,” getting him to this month’s sixth season just a year late.

He doesn’t see much likelihood that the festival will scale up in the years to come.

“I think we have some room to grow but not externally. I’d like to keep supporting the artists and building our audience, but I don’t envision any more events, God help me. We just want to have the resources to keep presenting world-class pianists but maybe ones you haven’t heard of or who haven’t played in San Francisco yet.”

Correction:An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Kathleen Riley. In addition to her career as a pianist, she is an optimal performance biofeedback specialist.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com;Twitter:@JoshuaKosman