Practice makes perfect for young guitarist

Blowing a kiss to the audience and hugging every judge and presenter onstage, an exuberant Pablo Sainz Villegas, 28, of Spain took the $25,000 Stotsenberg Prize on Friday in the closing ceremony of the first Parkening International Guitar Competition at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

The event -- named after classical guitarist Christopher Parkening, a professor of music at Pepperdine -- was the successor to the Stotsenberg guitar competition, held at the university every two years from 1997 to 2003. With cash awards totaling $50,000, the Parkening offered the largest purse prize of any such competition. Villegas’ award also includes a tour of recitals and concerts with an orchestra.

Philanthropist Dorothy Stotsenberg, 92, draped the gold medal around Villegas’ neck and received not only a hug but also kisses on both her hands.

“Villegas was here in 2003, and we told him to practice hard,” she said.

The young Spaniard was one of three finalists out of 15 competitors whittled down from more than 50 applicants. In the Friday finals, he played Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, led by Joana Carneiro. His solo encore was Jose Jimenez’s “La Boda de Luis Alonso.”

Kosovo-born Petrit Ceku, 20, took the $10,000 silver medal after playing Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Guitar Concerto No. 1 and an encore by Albeniz. Spanish guitarist Roberto Moron Perez, 26, won the $5,000 bronze medal.

The results might have been different had Perez, who also played the Rodrigo concerto, not had a memory lapse in the first movement that stopped his performance dead in its tracks. But he did finish, and he played a solo encore too.

Grammy Award-winning record producer Thomas Frost, head of the five-member jury, said later: “We all felt very sorry for Perez, but if a higher prize were given and he got engagements on the basis of that award, the reputation of the competition would suffer.”

Perez declined to comment on what had happened, according to a competition spokesperson.

The competition was the brainchild of Parkening, 58, a native Angeleno who first came to wide attention when he played Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s First Concerto with the Young Musicians Orchestra at UCLA in 1963, when he was 15. He had studied the piece under the composer, and a letter of introduction from Castelnuovo-Tedesco later paved the way for him to study with virtuoso Andres Segovia.

“This competition, I hope, will champion and reward the traditions of musical excellence so well exemplified by my mentor and friend, the great guitarist Andres Segovia,” a soft-spoken Parkening said in a pre-finals interview in his office at Pepperdine, where he joined the faculty in 2002.

“He moved millions with his beautiful, lyrical phrasing and his romantic spirit, but in recent years, as I tour around and travel, I see there’s been a growing trend away from this legacy in favor of a colder, mechanistic, purely intellectual playing.

“It is my goal to reverse this trend and to emphasize the importance of beauty, warmth and lyricism in musical performance. That’s what the judges are going to be looking for, and they will be listening with their heart.”

Although the competition was originally planned for every four years, Parkening announced at the end of the awards ceremony that the next one would take place in three years: May 27-30, 2009.

Other winners this year included Michael Bautista, 27, of Cupertino, Calif., and Robert Belinic, 24, of Croatia, who took fourth and fifth place, respectively, each receiving $1,000. The 10 remaining competitors were each awarded $500. Earlier in the week, Meng Su, 18, of China was awarded $3,000 as winner of the Young Guitarists Competition.

Besides Frost, the jury consisted of guitarist Eliot Fisk, cellist Lynn Harrell, Sony BMG Masterworks President Gilbert Hetherwick and Miryam Yardumian, director of artists and special projects at the Baltimore Symphony.