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Photo by Kalai Kennedy.
Kevin Grigsby plays piano for First Baptist Church of Trussville, but he’s had to brush up his classical skills in preparation for the competition.
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Photo by Kalai Kennedy.
The Grigsby family: Angela, Kevin, Stephen and Katherine.
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The Grigsby family of Trussville will be driving to Texas this summer, and like countless families before them, they’ll be stopping at museums, historic landmarks and, of course, the necessary number of service station restrooms along the way.
With two preteens in tow, the itinerary naturally will include at least one amusement park, and at some point, their course will veer north for a visit to the area where parents Angela and Kevin lived as newlyweds while he was earning a graduate degree at the University of Oklahoma.
The whole experience will be a good old-fashioned road trip, the average all-American family vacation. Except for one thing: The central purpose of their journey is for Kevin Grigsby to play in the Seventh Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition.
One of only 72 pianists from around the world chosen to compete (over twice that many applied) and the only Alabamian, the 41-year-old Alabama Power Company marketing executive will perform in the first round of the competition on Father’s Day. And since Kevin Grigsby’s motive for competing is family-driven, the timing couldn’t be more appropriate.
“My main goal here is to model behavior for my children,” he said. “No. 1, they’re seeing me prepare, and they know how much I’m putting into it. So they’re going to either see that sometimes you prepare and you’re determined and you do the best you can, but somebody else might do better than you — and that’s OK. The sun is still going to come up the next morning. Or they’re going to see that through that preparation, there’s success. So it’s kind of a win-win, I think.”
The trip itself is still weeks away, but the adventure actually began a few months ago when Angela Grigsby discovered the Van Cliburn competition online and encouraged her husband to apply. He, however, said he had doubts.
“I’d been dealing with arthritis in my right hand since March of 2013, so I started practicing a bit and thought, ‘I don’t think I can do it,’” Kevin Grigsby said. “But Angie encouraged me to keep practicing, and before I knew it, I had three pieces memorized. Now it’s almost like my hands are doing better because I’ve been practicing. I can close both fists and open doors, and things are good again.”
The prestigious competition is open to non-professional pianists (those who don’t earn their principal source of income through piano performance or instruction), age 35 and older. Established in 1999, it was designed to promote lifelong music-making and was the first competition of its kind in the United States. The festival is every four years, and the competitors are chosen through a rigorous application process requiring the submission of a 15-minute long videoed performance.
Kevin Grigsby is a classically trained pianist, but his musical outlet for the past few decades has been serving as a church musician in Moody and Trussville. He plays piano for the 4,000-plus-member First Baptist Church Trussville, a far cry from his first gig as a church pianist at First Methodist Church in Tarrant at age 12. By that time, he’d already studied piano for seven years.
“I’ve nearly put in my 30 years as a church musician,” he said.
Though church music has kept Kevin Grigsby in close contact with the keyboard, it’s done little to prepare him for the kind of competition he’ll be up against in Fort Worth.
“It’s been 17 years since I’ve played classical music from memory,” he said. “And when you sit down at the instrument, even when you know all this music, and you know it well, just creating the consistency you had 20 years ago, well, now it’s different. So I’m certainly not confident about what I’m doing. I’m just going out there and giving it what I’ve got.”
“I’m well prepared, and I’m going to do the best that I can do, and whatever that turns out to be, it turns out to be,” Kevin Grigsby said. “I went into this with the mindset that I may not even get in. But I’ve also got a picture in my mind of what winning looks like, so I think I’m prepared either way.”
His first round performance is scheduled for June 19 at 4 p.m., and he’ll find out June 20 if he’ll advance to the next round. Competition performances will be webcast live at cliburn.org, June 19-25.
But whether his name appears on the list of competitors for the second round, there’s one thing this talented family man knows for certain: “On Monday, we’re going to Six Flags,” he said.
