He was a small man, but a big pianist. He was a virtuosic technician who leapt into the spotlight early with flashy, eye-popping repertory — the Khachaturian concerto, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz — and then spent the rest of his life working on deepening his maturity and insight in, for instance, subtler works by Schubert and Bach. He died at 31 when the plane he was on hit a mountain near San Francisco in 1953. His name is William Kapell, and he is the namesake of the piano competition and festival that starts this week at the Clarice Smith Center.
Kapell himself was the kind of pianist who was good at competitions — he won his first one at the age of 10. The prize was a turkey dinner with the pianist Jose Iturbi. The Kapell competition offers rather more substantial fare: first prize comes with an award of $25,000. (Second prize is worth $15,000; third, $10,000.) In 1985, when Jeffrey Biegel won the competition — then known as the University of Maryland Piano Competition and Festival — victory came with a prize of $15,000, the highest-ever, at that time, for a piano competition. It no longer holds that distinction; but the prize money is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
When the competition began in 1971, it was as the University of Maryland International Piano Festival and Competition, and it had nothing to do with Kapell at all. It didn’t bear the pianist’s name, in fact, until the pianist Eugene Istomin, a slightly younger friend whom Kapell did a great deal to promote, became its director and renamed it in Kapell’s honor in 1986. In the beginning, it was held annually, attracting a whole range of piano manufacturers, music publishers, educators and other piano-world figures. Biegel remembers “hanging around the booths and meeting so many people.”
Today, the festival that bears Kapell’s name is operated by UMD’s Clarice Smith Center, and held every four years — more or less. The last competition was in 2007; the financial crisis in 2008 led the festival to postpone its next iteration by one year. “We just couldn’t see far enough in the future to know what might happen,” said Paul Brohan, the center’s director of artistic initiatives. Brohan says it’s difficult to break down the exact costs of funding the festival, but “it’s well into the six figures.”
The 2007 competition introduced a couple of innovations: It streamlined the number of competitors (there are 25 this year, winnowed down from some 185 applicants) and added a chamber-music component for the first time. This year, participants had to choose either a cello or a violin sonata, from a list of eight; 10 have chosen cello, and 15 have chosen violin. “Chances are good that we’ll get some of both,” says Jarl Hulbert, the competition coordinator, “but there’s always a chance we’ll get nine people playing cello sonatas.”
Another recurring factor is an emphasis on American repertory — a nod to Kapell, who championed American work and whom composer Ned Rorem once called “the first — and, alas, the only — big-time American pianist for whom the present was on a par with the past.” This year’s contestants had to choose a work by one of six American composers: George Walker, Samuel Adler, Michael Torke, Leon Kirchner, Judith Lang Zaimont or Hilary Tann.
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