Pianist Olga Kern. Time was not all that long ago when women classical pianists who were career performers were something of a novelty. For every Clara Schumann and Amy Beach, there were many more men with piano-playing careers, and it wasn’t until the latter part of the 20th century that this situation really started to change.

Nowadays, I shouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were about equal, and that women might soon be in the majority. I certainly have heard a large number of young women pianists lately, and this weekend and next, two of the more interesting ones will be in Miami for concerts.

Olga Kern, a Russian pianist who won the gold medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition, appears this weekend on the Sunday Afternoons of Music series at UM’s Gusman Hall.

A disc Kern recorded in 2004 for Harmonia Mundi was an all-Russian one that contained hair-raisingly hard pieces such as the Sonata No. 2 (in B-flat minor, Op. 36) of Rachmaninov and the piano tone poem Islamey, written by Mili Balakirev, the father of the so-called Mighty Handful of Russian composers in the mid-19th century (including Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, and Borodin).

Kern has a big, commanding sound and tackles these enormous pieces with zest and thorough technique. She’s an exciting, grand-manner sort of pianist, and she’ll be playing that Rachmaninov sonata, and Chopin’s Second Sonata in the same key, on Sunday’s program.

Also on the way is Argentina’s Ingrid Fliter, who will appear with the Cleveland Orchestra on March 26-27 at the Knight Concert Hall. She’ll be playing the Chopin Second Concerto (in F minor, Op. 21), a work she has often performed (here’s the second movement, from her performance at the International Chopin Competition in 2000, where she took the silver medal).

Fliter sticks to the more poetic, introspective side of the repertory, favoring Chopin, Beethoven, Haydn and other composers in the German tradition. She’s less flashy than Kern, more in the Rubinstein than the Horowitz style.

These two players are following some other significant women pianists. Earlier this month, the young Chinese pianist Yuja Wang played a wonderful version of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Russian National Orchestra at the Kravis Center, and at the end of February, the American pianist Claire Huangci took top prize at the Eighth National Chopin Competition in Miami.

That’s a great deal of talent passing through South Florida in a short period of time, and local concertgoers are indeed fortunate to have the opportunity to see so many fine female pianists. What’s different now is that while in the past many women were piano teachers rather than performers, today a sizeable number of women are pursuing concert careers instead.

In any case, the art of music is well-served.