Pianist Kenny Broberg has a lot of sports in his background. Growing up in Minnesota, he played hockey in high school – “Everyone in Minnesota plays hockey. The women play hockey, the men play hockey, everybody plays hockey,” he said – as well as baseball, until his piano teacher told him that playing catcher was too risky.

Years later, having chosen music as his preferred form of competition, he is experiencing the equivalent of going from college to the pros. After receiving the silver medal in last year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, he’s on an increasingly crowded concert schedule, with performances nearly every week.

Broberg makes his first visit to Hawaii this week, with his recital at Orvis Auditorium on Saturday completing a three-island tour that has taken him to Kauai and Maui.

“This is what I want. It will get busier and busier and busier,” he said in a call from Kansas City, Mo., where he is studying for his Masters. “I didn’t want to overload myself, going from playing 10 or 15 concerts a year to playing a 100 or something like that. It’s been manageable.”

At the Cliburn, Broberg played with a sincerity often missing among today’s bombastic virtuosos, as well as an intimate, colorful sound. In a theater broadcast of the finals, his Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, op. 43” came off as thoughtful and probing, performed with a transparent, light touch, which seems to be becoming one of his trademarks.

“One obvious feature of his playing was the bright, pearly tone quality,” said a review in the Minneapolis Star-Tribute of a recent performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto. “It animated the glimmering cascades of notes in the piano’s flamboyant opening gestures and put a bright smile on the many episodes of silvery trilling that Beethoven asks for in the concerto. … The slow movement had a clean, pellucid beauty, without a trace of sentimentality or false straining for profundity.”

Welcoming the praise, Broberg said he strives to create his own signature style – something that, with the ubiquity of online musical recordings, is becoming more and more challenging because pianists have tended to converge around a common sound and technique.

“If you look at great old musicians, every one of them has a distinct, different sound from each other. They have their own personality in their sound,” he said. “This is something that with the advent of recordings has been rocked a little bit, because everything is becoming mainstream. So some of the very great pianists of today are very great pianists, but their sound and their individuality is not quite as distinct from each other.”

Broberg started piano lessons at age 6, playing a piano his parents received as a gift but never played. His main musical inspiration comes from his grandfather, who after World War II was stationed near La Scala, the famed opera house in Italy, and went to performances there often.

His parents soon noticed that he has perfect pitch, which Broberg says allows him to imagine music “in a very specific way.”

“I know what the note is, and I know what key the piece is in all the time,” he said, an ability that allows him to grasp the harmonic structure of a piece immediately. “I don’t know life without it.”

In addition to his silver medal at the Cliburn, Broberg has won or placed in piano competitions in the UK, Sydney, Seattle and New Orleans, with the Sydney and the Cliburn competitions providing him with concert and promotion opportunities.

In fact, the ladder to success in music isn’t that much different than in sports, Broberg said.

“It’s pretty similar to tennis or golf, where there are Majors,” he said. “The difference being that with those things you can make winning an end into itself. Whereas music is art, and this is not the end game for us. We use these to gain exposure and recognition — and then when you’re done with that, you go and try to build a musical career.”

For his performance here, Broberg will perform Franck’s lovely “Prelude, Fugue and Variation in B Minor, Op. 18,” which has been transcribed from organ to piano. That will be followed by the “Night Wind” sonata by the Russian composer Nikolai Medtner, a younger contemporary of Rachmaninoff whose work is becoming increasingly popular among younger classical pianists.

“He’s a tough sell for audiences sometimes. He’s difficult to get into, difficult to listen to. It’s very thick writing,” Broberg said. “It’s generally considered, including by him, to be his masterpiece. It’s probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever played.”

Broberg added that Medtner has his own unique style. “Medtner doesn’t sound like a Russian composer,” he said. “Medtner sounds only like Medtner.”

Also on the program are Bach’s improvisational “Toccata in C Minor” and Samuel Barber’s dynamic “Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, Op. 26.”