Chopin

Kevin Kenner, a 27-year-old graduate of the Peabody Institute, was denied first prize in the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw last weekend. But that doesn't diminish the fact that his second prize was the top honor given this year -- an achievement that puts him in distinguished company. The last American to come out on top in the Chopin trials was Garrick Ohlsson in 1970. The second prize that year went to Mitsuko Uchida, the Japanese pianist whose career has since surpassed Ohlsson's, in large part on the strength of her exquisite Mozart performances and recordings.

Sunday, Jan. 6 Recital Pianist Brian Ganz performs a mini-recital of his all-Chopin concert at 7:30 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis, 333 Dubois Road. Recital is a preview of his upcoming concert at the Strathmore Music Center on Jan. 19. Cynthia Word, artistic director of the Word Dance Theater in Washington, will perform during several Chopin preludes. Event is free but donations to the church are requested. Information: 301-904-3690 or marca1030@gmail.com . Monday, Jan. 7 Photo club The Digital Photography Club of Annapolis meets at 7 p.m. at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, 801 Chase St. in Annapolis.

The Sonata No. 3 in B Minor is the most difficult of Chopin's large-scale works to bring off. No Romantic composer felt comfortable with classical form -- Chopin's B-flat Minor Sonata is really a titanic tone poem -- and the Sonata in B Minor has brought many pianists to grief. That Leon Bates performed it so successfully last night in Murphy Auditorium at Morgan State University was a tribute to musical intelligence of a very high order.Bates made the work's problems of tempo and phrasing seem relatively simple.

Concerts Pianist Brian Ganz will return to his hometown of Columbia to once again perform at the Sundays at Three chamber music concert series this Sunday, Nov. 6, p.m., at Christ Episcopal Church, located at 6800 Oakland Mills Road. Ganz is now based in Annapolis and regularly performs all over the world and earlier this year performed works by Chopin in that composer's homeland, Poland. He is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, where he studied under Leon Fleisher.

Chopin, Sonata No. 2 ("Funeral March") in B-flat Minor (opus 35) and Ballade No. 4 in F Minor (opus 52), and Juliusz Zarebski, "Novellette Caprice" (opus 19), "Grande Polonaise" (opus 6), "Serenade Burlesque" (opus 20), and "Suite Polonaise" (opus 16), performed by pianist Rachel Franklin (Endeca EN/RF-199401).Rachel Franklin, a young Baltimore-based British pianist, gave a lovely recital last year at the Walters Art Gallery, in which she performed some of these pieces. This record confirms the fine impression she made at that time.

Richard Goode took a sabbatical last year, and the fruits of that break in his schedule should be apparent when he performs Mozart's "Piano Concerto No. 27 (K.595)" this week in Meyerhoff Hall with David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.Because it is Mozart's final concerto and was among the last major works he completed before his death, Goode says, it's usually interpreted as a death-haunted valediction to a genre the composer had made his own as he had no other."But it is not as tragic as some of Mozart's earlier piano concertos," Goode says in a telephone interview.

In music, as in fashion and a host of other endeavors, exoticism sells. It is this capitalistic imperative, coupled with our natural feeling that the cachet-laden foreign model must somehow be superior to the domestic one, that whispers to us that pianists from, say, Vienna, Seoul or Tashkent are better than the home-grown variety. That stereotype was exposed for the nonsense it is Saturday at Maryland Hall when Brian Ganz, a concert pianist from exotic, far-off Crownsville, made his long overdue debut with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Kevin Kenner feels most at home with Chopin. It's hard to say if Chopin would feel the same about Kenner. But 700 people at the Peabody Institute's sold-out Friedberg Concert Hall last night felt at home with both gentlemen and awarded both first-place applause.The 27-year-old Kenner played Chopin's "Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor" with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra instead of the earlier planned Mozart Concerto No. 20. It was the same deeply Romantic piece he had played in Warsaw two weeks ago in winning top honors -- but only second prize -- in the Chopin Piano Competition.

Kevin Kenner should never have to enter a piano competitio again.The 27-year-old Peabody-trained American won "only" second prize in the 12th international Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland, early yesterday. But no first prize was awarded, and that left Mr. Kenner the top prize winner in one of the two most prestigious piano contests in the world -- Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition, in which Mr. Kenner won third place this summer, is the other.The Chopin finish also made him the only American to have emerged at the top of the heap in Warsaw since Garrick Ohlsson's historic victory there in 1970.

The piano recital is reputedly near extinction, but Baltimore seems to be late in getting the news.Today Garrick Ohlsson adds to an impressive list of scheduled performances that includes last weekend's packed-to-the-rafters appearance by Horacio Gutierrez and the prestigious lineup of the Shriver Hall Concert Series, which began with a recital by Leon Fleisher and will end in April with one by Murray Perahia.Ohlsson -- a physically imposing 6-foot-4 -- has been an important presence on the world's concert stages since 1970 when he became the only American to win first prize in Warsaw's Chopin Competition, beating out a strong field that included the likes of Mitsuko Uchida and Emanuel Ax.Since Ohlsson is a serious, thoughtful artist, it comes as something of a surprise that the first half of his recital tonight consists of the seemingly unlikely combination of Beethoven's backward-looking Sonata No. 16 in G major (Opus 31, No. 1)

The boy was 11, already well along in his process of discovering music, when he found himself alone at home one day, listening to a piece by one of history's great romantics. He couldn't explain it, but something in the sounds of Frederic Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Opus 23 — as played by Polish musician Witold Malcuzynsky — struck Brian Ganz like a bolt from stormy skies. "It was mysterious, sort of soulful, and I actually, literally, doubled over in pain," says Ganz, an internationally celebrated concert pianist who lives in Annapolis.

Brian Ganz is preparing to climb a musical Mt. Everest. He wants to perform all 250 keyboard-based works of Frederic Chopin. He's in no hurry, though. "This will probably take the better part of a decade," he said. Ganz will give a preview of the venture Saturday in Annapolis. The Chopin project will then be launched with a recital next month at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, where Ganz will eventually perform Chopin's piano/orchestra works with the National Philharmonic.

The driest May in Minnesota since the Dust Bowl. Venerable GM slides into bankruptcy and you shudder for the old Pontiac dealers and the retirees in Michigan. In the middle of the night, an Airbus drops out of the air into the Atlantic Ocean, and the veteran traveler shudders to think of it. And the posthumous John Updike appears in the bookstore, a book of short stories and his last poems, written by "my right hand ... faithful old five-fingered beast of burden ... its labors meant to carve from language beauty, that beauty which lifts free of flesh to find itself in print."

We all fall for something, at some point. A quick cure for the common cold. An impossibly cheap piece of electronic equipment that will somehow perform better than the high-priced name brand. Quite a few critics fell for the discography of the late British pianist Joyce Hatto. They have probably been trying to wipe the egg from their faces since the news broke a couple of weeks ago that the recordings are a giant fraud. (I had been feeling guilty that I never bought her CDs. Now, of course, I'm feeling terribly smug.

Piano enthusiasts who subscribe to the Anne Arundel Community Concert Association and South County Concert Association are in luck this month. A reciprocal agreement entitles members of either group to attend the other's concerts, so some from both groups were treated Friday to a classical concert by award-winning Russian pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine. In two weeks, at Southern High School, another award-winning classical pianist, California-raised Alpin Hong, will peform. Moutouzkine, 26, revealed a delightful and offbeat sense of humor in his introductions to his musical selections, suggesting that Chopin's "Three Songs" might have been motivated by the composer's intent to captivate young ladies, a goal he apparently achieved.

The last time two pianists sparked widespread acclaim, generated reams of publicity and divided their admirers into opposing camps was at least half a century ago, back in the heyday of Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein. Today, a pair of richly gifted, 22-year-old Chinese keyboard artists are doing the same. By a happy coincidence of scheduling, Lang Lang and Yundi Li will both give recitals in Baltimore within the span of a month. The former appears today at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall with a program of Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

Two weeks after being the host for Elmar Oliveira, a violinist's violinist, Candlelight Concerts of Columbia is poised to present a pianist's pianist Sunday. Richard Goode is not known for his fire-breathing renditions of warhorses such as the Tchaikovsky 1st and Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concertos. He plays Chopin beautifully, but in a scrupulously crafted manner that's short on flash and dash, and I'm not sure he's ever closed a recital with a razzle-dazzle transcription of "Carmen" or Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

Five and a half feet tall and never weighing more than 110 pounds, Frederic Chopin looked delicate, almost transparent, and not quite of this world.Novelist George Sand, whose 10-year love affair with him has become the stuff of legend, called him her "little one." His friend, composer Felix Mendelssohn, not exactly a heavyweight himself, dubbed him "Chopinetto."He was always suffering from something. "Chopin has been dying his whole life long," said one malicious Parisian lady, and another: "He has the most charming cough."

Richard Goode's performance Saturday night, a benefit for the Candlelight Concert Society, was simply superb. The compositions in the beautifully chosen program - Bach's Partita No. 6, Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, Beethoven's Sonata Op. 109, Debussy's Preludes, Volume I, and, as an encore, Chopin's Nocturne Op. 55 No. 2 - highlighted contrasting periods and styles, but the evening's performance was unified by an emphasis on sonority, clarity...