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That Kevin Chen, 16, of Calgary won the 30,000-Euro first prize in the Franz Liszt International Piano Competition is impressive enough. That he was the youngest contestant in a field of 22 calls for something like astonishment.
A YouTube video capturing the livestreamed three-hour-plus gala on Sept. 19 testifies to his high levels of both virtuosity and personality in György Cziffra’s gussied-up version of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Hungarian National Philharmonic under Gergely Vajda.
To all appearances, the Franz Liszt Academy Concert Hall was full and musicians were neither masked nor distanced. Handshakes and hugs aplenty in Budapest!
“Before I go on stage is the most nerve-racking part,” Chen told the Calgary Herald. “But once I go on stage, I don’t think about it anymore. I just sit down and play and all of it just goes away.”
According to the Herald, the phenom is also a composer with “more than 100 pieces of music, including four full symphonies and one piano concerto” to his credit.
For the last four years, Chen has been a student of Marilyn Engle, herself a former prodigy and a University of Calgary professor who also briefly taught Calgary prodigy Jan Lisiecki. He has been winning competitions and recognition from the start, including a top prize at the Canadian Music Competition (seven-year-old category). In 2013, he was included in CBC Music’s the Top 30 Hot Canadian Classical Musicians Under 30 and in 2019, he won the e-Piano Junior Competition in Minneapolis.
The Franz Liszt Competition win has convinced Chen to pursue music as a career, although it is too early to say whether it would be as a pianist or composer, let alone which school he will attend when he graduates.
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