Modern day prodigies

Recently the Okanagan was host to the Canadian Culinary Championships Gold Medal Plates. This is a wonderful event and fundraiser for Canada’s Olympic athletes.

Winning Canadian chefs at the top of their game come to Kelowna to compete in various challenges including; a mystery wine pairing, a creation using seven disparate ingredients from a black box and finally each chef’s signature dish.

The winner this year, Alex Chen created a “treasure trove of wild B.C. shellfish set in a rich custardy chowder topped with a translucent layer of golden gelee made from a stock of geoduck and sturgeon bones.”

Chef Chen explained “It’s all about umami and fun”

I have a friend who often says, “if you can read, you can cook” and I, like many, can follow a recipe to put together a half decent meal that provides basic nutrition and might even experiment with flavours and colours.

Experiencing food that is created by chefs at the top of their game, though, that is a different world entirely. I find the combination of skill and creativity so inspiring.

You can see, smell and taste the 10,000 hours of practice that has occurred to get these chefs to the top of their game. It is not unlike the 10,000 hours that go in to creating a great performer.

Chefs, writers, musicians, Olympic ice dancers have more in common than you might think. Many start their training as children and over many years develop a technique that allows them to fully express their individual creativity and gain mastery over their chosen field of expression.

So I did some math. If you spend 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year for eight straight years you will have put in your 10,000 hours to get you to an expert level in your chosen field. Spread out over 24 years that comes down to eight hours a day, every day.

So how do we explain someone who has mastery over their skills when they are just 12 years old? We usually just call them a prodigy. The Oxford dictionary defines the term prodigy as “someone with a very great ability that usually shows itself when that person is a young child”.

Prodigies can be found in every discipline; culinary arts, athletics, chess, mathematics, and many others, including music. The most famous musical prodigy was, of course, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His talent was so exquisite that more than 250 years after his death his name still resonates as one of the greatest prodigies in history. He did his first concert tour at six, composed his first symphony at eight and his first opera at 10. By 12 years of age he was established across Europe as a formidable musician.

What about prodigies in our modern times?

Enter Kevin Chen. Kevin is 12 years old. He lives in Calgary with his parents and has three younger siblings. Kevin began playing piano at the age of five. Within three years he had completed with distinction the Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto (ARCT). At eight years of age, he was the youngest pianist to ever do this. I completed my ARCT at eighteen which is much more the norm. That was also the first year that Kevin was named to the top 30 classical musicians under 30 list by the CBC.

At nine, Kevin started performing as a soloist with professional orchestras and now at the tender age of twelve, Kevin has composed over 80 works.

Kevin will be the featured soloist and composer next week with the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra (OSO). We will give the World Premiere of his orchestral work Loud Sense.

In addition to performing on our main stage shows, he will also perform on our Symphony School Shows where 4,500 children across the Okanagan will get the chance to hear him. He will perform the Piano Concerto No. 20 by none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and I cannot wait to share the stage with him. We thought it fitting to call the performance “Prodigy!”

Rosemary Thomson is conductor and music director for the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra.