NEW YORK -- A Canadian pianist Sunday won the 1985 Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition, in which 177 contestants vied for the title and $75,000 in prizes.
Marc-Andre Hamelin, 29, a native of Montreal and graduate student in music at Temple University in Philadelphia, was selected as the first prize winner at the end of a two-day final round of the competition held at Carnegie Hall.
Preliminary rounds, in which 177 pianists from 13 countries competed, were held in June in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston and London.
Twelve semi-finalists, including eight Americans, and one each from the Netherlands, Norway, England and Canada, played selections of 20th-century American music Saturday before the field was narrowed to three finalists.
Hamelin and the two other finalists, Alan Gravill of England and Steven Mayer of New York City, played piano concertos Sunday with the American Composers Orchestra in the final round of the competition. They played concertos composed b Donald Martino, John Harbison and Leon Kirchner, respectively.
Mayer won the $5,000 second prize and Gravill, the $3,000 third prize.
The $75,000 first prize won by Hamelin, one of the highest awards offered in a classical music competition, includes cash awards of $15,000.
The prize also includes $35,000 in funds for career promotion, with a premiere performance of a newly commissioned work and other recital and orchestral bookings, and a $25,000 recording contract.
The competition, which is the only major music competition exclusively for musicians performing 20th-century American music, was established in 1978 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and moved to Carnegie Hall in 1981.
Willa Rouder, the director of the competiton, said the contest was founded to encourage performance of modern American music because 'it is often neglected in favor of standard 18th- and 19th-century concert repertoire. This competition offers incentive to people to perform it.'
'What the competition has done is encourage a high level of performance of American music, and encouraged larger numbers of accomplished performers to play this repertoire,' said Rouder.
Rouder said more than 1,000 people have taken part in the competition since its inception, and the majority have continued to perform music of modern American composers.
Carnegie Hall sponsors the competition with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and holds it in alternate years, rotating between piano, vocal and violin contests.
