SAN DIEGO PIANIST WINS $40,000 AWARD

A $40,000 prize has been awarded to David Korevaar, a 23-year-old pianist from San Diego, the Peabody-Mason Music Foundation announced last week. Korevaar, a La Jolla High School alumnus, was cited by the Boston foundation in winning the 1985 Sponsorship for Pianist award for “extraordinary and superior performance.”

Korevaar is the second person to win the award. He and his brothers were known around the county for winning mathematics awards while in high school. Korevaar last played in San Diego at a 1984 La Jolla Chamber Music Society recital that helped raise $6,000 for his New York debut recital at Town Hall in March.

A student of Earl Wild at the Juilliard School, Korevaar earned undergraduate and master’s degrees there by the age of 20. The Peabody-Mason competition, in which he prevailed over more than 150 contestants, is Korevaar’s first victory in a major music competition. The cash stipend, allocated over a two-year period, is designed “to give one highly qualified American pianist the opportunity to concentrate for two years on the expansion of his repertoire,” and to allow time for musical development. One caveat is that the winner not enter competitions during the next two years.

Korevaar, who lives in New York, said his musical tastes are “fairly eclectic,” that he prefers the rarely performed works of well-known composers and has a “perpetual fascination” with post-Romantic music. For the final free choice recital in the Peabody-Mason competition, he played Beethoven’s rarely performed Sonata No. 1, Opus 31; pieces by Brahms (Opus 119); Cezar Franck (“Prelude, Chorale and Fugue”), and Scriabin (a set of etudes, Opus 42 and Sonata No. 9). “Right now it’s a quiet period for me,” he said in a telephone interview from New York. But he has a management firm, Judd Concert Bureau, and expects that, as word of the award gets around, he will be increasingly busy.

BRACH REDUX: Artist Paul Brach returns Saturday to UC San Diego, where he was the first chairman of the Department of Visual Arts, for an exhibition of his works.

“Paul Brach--A Retrospective” is a 30-year overview of his paintings that have been acquired by museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York.

More than half the pieces in the exhibit, organized by the Mulvane Center of Topeka, Kan., are recent paintings, primarily nocturnal desert landscapes. They incorporate traditional Navajo geometric patterns as borders around scenes of mountains, mesas and running horses. In Brach’s words, the new works express his ideal place, “distanced by reveries and memories of boyhood summers on a ranch in Arizona.”

The exhibit is at the Mandeville Gallery. Brach, who lives in New York, was UCSD visual arts chairman in 1967-69.

GLOBE GAB: Once more, with feeling. For the third time, the Globe has extended the comedy “Greater Tuna.” The play about a small Texas town, written by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard, will run through Oct. 20 at the Cassius Carter Center Stage. Actors Larry Drake and Philip Reeves continue playing 10 denizens apiece from the hamlet of Tuna, Tex.

Actor Paxton Whitehead, who bestrode the stage in the evil title role of “Richard III,” can be seen in a character part as Snout the Tinker in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Whitehead replaced Thomas S. Oleniacz, who left to play the lead in a Cleveland Playhouse production of “In the Belly of the Beast.” “Dream” plays at 8 p.m. nightly through Sunday at the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre.

MUSIC: More chamber music is on the way. The Pacific Chamber Ensemble opens its second season Oct. 28 and will continue to feature local musicians as soloists. Music director Ethan Dulsky, who is also assistant principal hornist with the San Diego Symphony, prefers to showcase local players--not just because he can’t afford more expensive visitors, but because “we have just as fine musicians here as you will hear anywhere.”

There will be five concerts in the season. Four are at Westminster Presbyterian Church and the fifth is at Congregation Beth El, where the concert will feature the Ernest Bloch “Sacred Service” with full orchestra and 60-voice chorus. Other concerts will feature Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks,” Copland’s “Quiet City,” Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, Holst’s “St. Paul’s Suite” and Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.”

A musical fund-raiser Oct. 11 at the Hilton Hotel ($50 a ticket) will feature smaller ensembles playing around the bayside patio before the major works of the evening indoors: the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the Barber “Adagio for Strings,” and Corelli’s Concerto Grosso, Opus 6, No. 8 (the “Christmas Concerto”).

This weekend, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Octet will open the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s season at the Old Globe Theatre. The British performing ensemble will play Enesco’s Octet, the six-part fugue from the ricercare of Bach’s “Musical Offering” and Mendelssohn’s Octet, Opus 20 in E flat.

ARTBEATS: San Diego Pops summer season results are in. Attendance for the 50 subscription performances at Hospitality Point on Mission Bay and the seven concerts around the county was just under 200,000 . . . “Progressive Collecting,” a show featuring works of 15 artists at the Photography Gallery in La Jolla, opens Saturday. Among the photographers represented are John Baldessari, Eileen Cowin, Leland Rice and William Wegman.