'Beyond excellent': Calgary teen wins first prize at world-leading music competition

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Calgary’s own piano prodigy Kevin Chen, 17, took home first prize at the Councours de Genève music competition on Thursday.

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The event, founded in 1939, is one of the world’s leading international music competitions and the young pianist had a strong contingent of notable Calgarians watching the excitement unfold online Thursday night.

“We were in tears after every round he played,” said Jean Grand-Maitre, the former artistic director of Alberta Ballet who enlisted Chen to play piano as part of his final piece for the company, The Memory Room, in May as part of the High Performance Rodeo at the GRAND. “It was so beyond excellent.”

This year’s edition of the Councours de Genève initially featured 182 candidates, which was cut down to 40 pianists aged 16 to 29 from 14 countries by a jury. The 40 pianists were then cut down to nine semi-finalists, and then four finalists. The final showdown took place in Geneva, Switzerland.

Chen wasn’t only the first-prize winner: he also took home the Young Audience Prize, the Rose-Marie Huguenin Prize, the Fondation Etrillard Prize, the Concerts de Jussy Prize, the Socété des Arts Prize and the Steinway Prizewinner Concerts prize. He’ll take home around CHF 42,000 (C$56,830).

Chen’s victory is another addition to the prodigy’s already noteworthy career. Last year, he became the youngest musician in history to win the prestigious Frank Liszt International Competition.

The week before Chen left for Switzerland, he gave a private performance at the home of his teacher, University of Calgary professor Marilyn Engle, for a small audience that included Grand-Maitre and Calgary-based superstar kd lang. Grand-Maitre said he has made a point of making Chen an informal “retirement project” by introducing him to lang and musicians and others in the classical-music world in Montreal. lang was already a fan, having seen Chen perform with the Calgary Philharmonic.

“Kevin processes an innate understanding … a pure, uncontrived connection to the source,” lang said. “He allows us to witness the inconceivable in a most genuine way. I am rapt by his performances: Crying, laughing and shaking my head in awe. Kevin, simply, is a marvel.”

The win in Geneva will again move Chen up the ranks in the classical music world, granting him mentorship and international concert opportunities, Grand-Maitre said.

He said he recognized Chen’s astounding talents immediately when they worked together on the Memory Room.

“He’s very humble, very quiet, very shy,” Grand-Maitre says. “You’d never hear more than five words at a time. But he was an extremely talented professional. He would show up at rehearsals and suddenly you realized you were in the room with talent at a very high level. Then he’d have to go off to math class. You would have to make sure his father was always with him because he was underage and that we got him to bed early because he had school the next day. It was the most extraordinary thing.

“When you chat with him, you see somebody who appreciates anything and everything someone will do for him. He’s very humble that way. Then you have this talent, on the other hand, that is world-class and he can stand in front of the greatest conductors and musicians of the world at the age of 17.”

Chen has been winning competitions and earning attention since he was seven years old. That was when he was awarded a top prize at the Canadian Music Competition in the seven-year-old category.

The CBC named him among the “Top 30 Hot Canadian Classical Musicians Under 30” in 2013 when he was 10. In 2019, he took home the win at the e-Piano Junior Competition, an international event held in Minneapolis for classical pianists aged 17 and under.

With files from Eric Volmers