San Diegan Wins Top Prize in Polish Chopin Competition

San Diego resident Kevin Kenner won the top prize awarded today in the prestigious 12th International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition.

The jury awarded no first prize, apparently agreeing with the audience that the competitors performed with technical skill but not genius. Deliberations continued for three hours past the scheduled announcement.

Kenner, an American studying in Hanover, Germany, was awarded the Silver Medal with a prize of $2,100.

“I am happy and relieved,” said Kenner, 27, as he was hugged by his wife and his teacher in the lobby of the National Philharmonic Hall, where the three-week competition was staged.

Yukio Yokoyama, a 19-year-old Tokyo native studying in Paris, won the third-prize Bronze Medal, with a prize of $1,575.

Fourth places went to Corrado Rollero, 21, of Italy, and Margarita Shevchenko, 23, of the Soviet Union. Fifth places were awarded to Anna Malikova, 25, of the Soviet Union and Takako Takahashi, 26, of Japan.

The judges awarded no prizes for the best performance of a Chopin mazurka or for the concertos. The award for the best polonaise went to Kenner and Wojciech Switala, 23, who withdrew from the third round after being the only Pole to reach the semifinal.

Kenner, born in Coronado, studied with a Polish-American teacher before attending the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore.

He called the judge’s withholding of a first prize “disappointing” but “very strange and very interesting.”

This is not the first time that Kenner, a semifinalist in the 1989 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has been deemed to play unemotionally. In an April review of a San Diego State University recital by Kenner, Times classical music critic Kenneth Herman wrote:

“Kenner’s brilliance in the ‘Grand Polonaise’ was cold and impersonal, without a hint of passion, and eliminating passion from Chopin is like purging the blues of melancholy.”

The competition has been staged since 1927 to honor Chopin, the composer born in 1810 near Warsaw. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory but settled in Paris, where he gave his first concert in 1831 and went on to use his Romantic compositions to establish the piano as a solo instrument.

He never returned to his homeland but recalled Poland in his polonaises and mazurkas. He died of tuberculosis in 1849 and was buried in Paris. His heart, however, was interred in a Warsaw church, and Poles embrace him as a national hero.

The 12th staging of the competition by the Chopin Society in Warsaw attracted nearly 140 competitors. The seven finalists performed Chopin’s concertos in E minor or F minor on Thursday and Friday.

The winner was to be announced by the jury at 11 p.m. Friday, but was not presented until about 2 a.m. today. While waiting, the anxious contestants mingled with autograph-seekers and an international audience of Chopin enthusiasts.

Only one American has ever won the first prize, Garrick Ohlsson in 1970, and none has placed second.