Experience Beats 1st Place for Prize-Winning Pianist

SAN DIEGO —  If there are 12-step programs for competition addicts, pianist Kevin Kenner is a candidate. The former Coronado resident has seemingly made a career of entering--and winning--competitions.

Last fall, he won top prize in Warsaw’s International Chopin Competition. Also last year, he won a bronze medal in the 1990 Moscow Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. In the 1989 Van Cliburn Piano Competition, he was the highest-ranking U.S. competitor, and in 1988 he won the Gina Bachauer Competition in Utah. At this stage of his career, however, Kenner, 27, is going cold turkey on competitions.

“I don’t foresee going through another piano competition,” he said in a phone interview from London. “It’s really out of the question. The purpose of entering them was to gain performance opportunities, which is now happening, so there is really no purpose to continue the competition route.”

Kenner, who has been studying in Europe for the past two years, will return to San Diego this week to play the Grieg Piano Concerto on Wednesday and Thursday with the San Diego Symphony. It will be his first real performance with the hometown orchestra, although 10 years ago, a teen-age Kenner performed Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain” for one of the orchestra’s young people’s concerts.

Kenner left Coronado in the mid-’80s to study at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, where he earned a master’s degree in piano performance under Leon Fleisher, and for the last two years he has been living in Hanover, Germany.

Part of Kenner’s competition ennui comes from the flap over the Chopin judges’ withholding first prize, the only time in the contest’s 63-year history that the first prize was not awarded. The 21-member jury felt that despite the contestants’ abundant virtuosity, they lacked interpretive depth. According to Kenner, he was “elated” when he was awarded second prize, better than the other 139 pianists. What bothered the soft-spoken musician was the way in which the New York Times twisted his comments.

“Of course you always hope the first prize will be awarded, but when I said that I was a ‘bit disappointed’ that I did not receive first prize, the Times turned my words into ‘bitter disappointment for Mr. Kenner.’ I knew that being the highest ranked pianist would grant me opportunities to perform, which would be more important in the long run than the decision of one jury.”

Since the Chopin Competition, Kenner has made a recital tour of Germany and his London debut at Wigmore Hall. Later this summer, he has orchestra engagements in Italy and Poland, and a concert tour of the Orient is slated for the year’s end. And he continues to give concerto performances in the United States as part of the Xerox Affiliate program, to which he was named two years ago.

If competitions have given Kenner the name recognition he wanted, he admits that there is a down side to spending one’s creative time being groomed for competitions.

“It tends to limit your repertory to a few pieces. For example, you have to learn a specific Bach prelude and fugue for a contest, rather than learning the whole volume of 24 preludes and fugues. You may be able to fool a jury by playing that prelude and fugue well, but what do you really know about Bach?”

After the Van Cliburn Competition, Kenner secured a scholarship from the German government to study with noted keyboard pedagogue Karlheinz Kammerling in Hanover. The major reason he chose Kammerling was to acquire a European perspective on piano performance and concentrate on traditional German repertory with a German teacher. As it turned out, the competition repertory he needed to learn while under Kammerling’s tutelage was particularly light in Germanic repertory.

Kenner’s Hanover residency is over at the end of July. He joked that he and his wife, pianist Sonia Dimbinsk, would be “homeless” then. Because Dimbinska is English, the musical couple intends to settle in London. It’s a long way from Kenner’s family in Coronado, but it is midway between New York and Europe, the two places where Kenner hopes his performance career will blossom.

Wherever they settle in London, their flat will need to be near a friendly church or music school, since the two pianists can’t both practice under the same roof.

“In Hanover, when one of us was practicing at home,” Kenner explained, “the other had to go up the street to a church that had a good piano and practice there.”