Kevin Kenner
Recognized internationally as a prime interpreter of the music of Chopin, Kevin Kenner’s career was launched in 1990 when he was awarded the top prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. That same year he also won the Terence Judd Award in London and 3rd prize at the 1990 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
Kenner’s achievements have won him international acclaim. The Chicago Tribune praised him as “one of the finest American pianists to come along in years.” Britain’s Independent described one of his recitals as “…the best performance I have ever heard in the concert hall of all four of Chopin’s ‘Ballades’.” The Financial Times hailed Professor Kenner as a “player of grace, subtle variety, and strength with a mature grasp of dramatic structure and proportion.” And the Washington Post proclaimed him “a major talent… an artist whose intellect, imagination and pianism speak powerfully and eloquently.” Conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, a former associate of the late Artur Rubinstein, said Professor Kenner’s work was among the most sensitive and beautiful he had ever heard.
He has concertized and recorded over the last decade as a duo partner of violinist Kyung-Wha Chung and has performed with the Tokyo, Escher, Belcea, Mosaiques, Apollon Musagete, Endellion, and Vogler Quartets. He has been invited to appear at the Verbier Festival, Warsaw’s “Chopin and His Europe” Festival, and the PyeongChang Festival. A distinguished recording artist, Kenner’s interpretations of works by Paderewski and Chopin were each picked as recordings of the month by Gramophone, which also singled out his recording “Resonances” as one of 50 of the greatest recordings of Chopin works. The most recent recording of his own chamber arrangements of the Chopin Concertos was nominated by BBC Magazine for the 2020 Recording of the Year. He was awarded two Fryderyks for his recordings of works of Piazzolla (2006) and concert works of Paderewski (2011).
After teaching for more than a decade as a professor at London’s Royal College of Music, Kenner accepted a post at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, where he continues to prepare many young talented pianists for international performance careers. Following his three-year tenure as Visiting Professor at the Academy of Music in Łódź, Poland he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2018. In 2019 he was awarded the Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Alumnus Award as well as the Amicus Poloniae Award from the Polish Ambassador to the U.S. In February 2020 he chaired the jury of the Chopin Foundation’s National Chopin Competition in Miami. And in 2021 he served as vice-chairman of the jury of the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
Wojciech Switala
A graduate of the Katowice Academy of Music, where he studied in the class of Józef Stompel at Katowice Academy of Music, Wojciech Świtała also counts among his teachers Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Andre Dumortier and Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden.
He is a prize-winner of international piano competitions in Paris (the Long-Thibaud) and Montreal. He was the best Polish participant in the 12th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, when he received the prize for the best performance of a polonaise and a number of other prizes.
He has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in most countries of Europe and in countries of both Americas. He has appeared in concert with most Polish symphony orchestras, the Silesian, Camerata and Royal string quartets and the Aukso Orchestra, as well as the violinists Szymon Krzeszowiec and Piotr Pławner and the soprano Ewa Iżykowska. He has recorded up to twenty discs for Polskie Nagrania, Bearton, DUX, Sony Music Polska and IMC, with music by Brahms, Liszt, Schumann, Debussy, Chopin, Szymanowski and Zarębski. In 2000 and 2005, his discs twice won the Grand Prix du Disque Frédéric Chopin, and in 2002 and 2009 he won a ‘Fryderyk’ award from the Polish music industry.
Since 1998, he has also pursued pedagogic work. From 2008 to 2012, he was deputy vice-chancellor for learning and didactics at the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, where he has been head of the Piano Department since 2012. He has been a juror of the Long-Thibaud (Paris) and Paderewski (Bydgoszcz) international competitions, the Polish Chopin Competition in Warsaw and many others. In 2014, he was appointed to the Programme Committee of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute. His recordings for the Institute include Chopin’s Preludes on period instrument, which received the highest recommendation from BBC Classic, and the Ballades in the ‘white series’. He has been a longtime member of the jury of the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
John Rink
John Rink is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the music of Fryderyk Chopin. A graduate of Princeton University, King’s College London and the University of Cambridge, he also earned a Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He won many competitions as a young pianist. As a performer, he has focussed recently on period instruments, and he is a renowned authority on playing Pleyel pianos. He is an award-winning expert on the manuscript and printed sources for Chopin’s works, the performance history of his music over the past 200 years (including Chopin’s own playing style), analysis of the repertoire, editorial practices and aspects of critical reception. Since 2009, when he became Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, he has been Professor of Musical Performance Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is also Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at St John’s College, Cambridge and a visiting professor at Royal Holloway London, Queen Mary London and the Shanghai and Yong Siew Toh (Singapore) conservatories. He is the author of many works on Chopin, including Chopin Studies 2 (with Jim Samson, 1994), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997) and the award-winning Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski, 2010). He is Series Editor of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition, published by Peters, and General Editor of a new series of books on musical performance (OUP, 2016). He also directs two major online projects: Chopin’s First Editions Online (www.chopinonline.ac.uk/cfeo) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (www.chopinonline.ac.uk/ocve). Since 2003, John Rink has served on the Programme Committee of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.