Gilmore Festival an Alternative to Piano Competitions?

In one of the first major moves in its four-year history, the Irving S. Gilmore Keyboard Festival will announce this week the recipients of four large career grants to young pianists, totaling $70,000.

The emerging pianists, selected from 54 nominees, are: Wendy Chen, 18, of Los Angeles; Brenda Huang, 17, of Northbrook, Ill.; Peter Miyamoto, 20, of San Francisco; and Christopher Taylor, 20, of Boulder, Colo..

Chen, whose renewable grant is for $40,000, was, until her graduation this spring, a W.M. Keck Scholar at the R.D. Colburn School of Performing Arts here; in September she will begin studies at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore.

Huang is still a high school student; in 1988 she won the National Chopin Competition in New York. Miyamoto, at present a student of Leon Fleisher and Claude Frank at Peabody, is a former winner of the Bronislaw Kaper Award. Taylor, now studying with Russell Sherman at Harvard University, has won a number of national piano competitions. Huang, Miyamoto and Taylor are being awarded $10,000 each; these grants are also renewable.

According to David Pocock, artistic director of the $2-million, biennial Gilmore Festival, headquartered in Kalamazoo, Mich., the grants program is only one of the festival’s three prongs:

* A nine-day piano festival--made up of concerts, recitals orchestral performances and master classes--will be held every other year, beginning in April, 1991, in Kalamazoo.

* A biennial program of grants to young artists (up to five) will award achievement and promise in amounts totaling up to $200,000, the individual grants to be used for career development.

* Once every two years, the festival will designate a Gilmore Artist--that artist, of any age, to be chosen through “a virtually anonymous process,” Pocock said, and given not a one-time prize, but instead, “management services, a two-year international concert tour and financial assistance.”

Pocock added: “An international committee is making secret nominations to an artistic advisory (board) that over the months will travel, incognito, to hear the artists perform in scheduled recitals and concerts. So discreet is the process that only by winning will the pianist know that he or she has been nominated for the award.” Announcement of the winner will be made on opening day of the Gilmore Festival, April 27, 1991.

“Musicianship, rather than competition skills, should, for once, have the last say,” Pocock said.

“Competition . . . is not humane. This is our way of changing the system.”

The Gilmore Festival is named after a longtime Kalamazoo businessman, the late Irving S. Gilmore, an amateur pianist who aided and supported many musicians during his lifetime. The festival, a separate entity, is one of many projects sponsored by the Gilmore Foundation of Kalamazoo.

Pocock, who visited Los Angeles recently, told The Times that the $2-million cost of the entire two-year festival project ending in 1991 was covered by $1.4 million given by the Gilmore Foundation; the rest came from fund-raising done by festival management.

The 1991 festival, scheduled to be held from April 27-May 5, will offer 34 concerts in nine days. Performers include: Claudio Arrau, Alicia de Larrocha, Matti Raekallio, Leon Fleisher, the Blair String Quartet, Malcolm Frager, Chick Corea, Malcolm Bilson, Anthony di Bonaventura, Vladimir Feltsman, Igor Kipnis and Marian McPartland.

ANOTHER ‘NEXT WAVE’: For the seventh Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year, festival makers devoted a portion of the fall-length event to arts in the Ruhr region of West Germany. This year, during the eighth Next Wave Festival from Oct. 2-Dec. 9, a four-part sub-festival will be called “Next Wave/Next Door” and will focus on work being done by Canadian artists in dance and theater.

The dance company called O Vertigo Danse will give premieres of two works during the festival; in addition, a dance/theater troupe, Carbone 14, will present “Le Dortoir” (The Dormitory). And the theatrical company, Le Theatre Repere, will make its New York debut with “Polygraph,” written and staged by Robert Lepage.

Other dance events on the festival proper include return engagements by visiting dance companies: Monnaie Dance Group/Mark Morris will give two separate programs; Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Co. returns with a world premiere, “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Susan Marshall & Co. will bring another world premiere to Brooklyn.

PEOPLE: Cellist Hae-Ye Ni, a first-year student at the San Francisco Conservatory, has won the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation International Cello Competition in New York City, taking $5,000 in cash and two recital appearances in Lincoln Center, among other prizes. Sharing the second prize were Marius May, 32, of London, England, and Gustav Rivinius, 25, from Saar, Germany. . . . Stage director August Everding and set designer Hans Schavernoch have been engaged (with the already announced conductor, Zubin Mehta) for the new production of Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen” cycle at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992-93.