Playwright, Pianist Win Chandler Awards

Playwright-director George C. Wolfe and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes are the winners of the 1992 Dorothy B. Chandler Awards, the Los Angeles Music Center has announced.

Each winner will receive a cash award of $25,000, as well as a commemorative bronze sculpture by artist Robert Graham. Past winners include soprano Kallen Esperian, choreographer Bill T. Jones, violinist Midori, choreographer Charles Moulton and designer-producer Julie Taymor.

Wolfe, who wrote the play “The Colored Museum,” also wrote and directed “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which won nine Drama-Logue Awards and two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards during its run at the Mark Taper Forum and is now a Tony Award-winning Broadway production starring Gregory Hines.

Andsnes, who made his debut as a concert pianist in Oslo, Norway, in 1987 at age 18, first performed in the United States in New York and Washington in 1989. The 1990 winner of the Grieg Prize, Andsnes has performed with the Oslo Philharmonic at the Edinburgh Festival and the Scottish National Orchestra. He first performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1991.

The annual awards, inaugurated in 1989 as part of the Music Center’s 25th anniversary celebration, were created to “fuel the creativity and prominence of performing artists . . . (who) have the potential to be in the forefront of the next generation’s creative vanguard,” will be awarded Nov. 1 at a gala ceremony at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Each year, two “20th-Century Masters of the Arts” are selected from the fields of music, dance, opera and theater by the directors of the appropriate Music Center resident performing arts companies. The “Masters,” in turn, help select the winners of the Chandler awards. This year’s “Masters” were L.A. Philharmonic music director-designate Esa-Pekka Salonen and playwright Athol Fugard, who made their selections in collaboration with Ernest Fleischmann, executive vice president and managing director of the Philharmonic, and Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum.