Former Mikowsky student wins Gilmore and Avery Fisher Artist Awards
Kirill Gerstein
Yuja Wang (left, in Los Angeles) and Kirill Gerstein (in Boston) were the soloists in two new piano concertos on Thursday.CreditCreditPhilip Cheung for The New York Times; Winslow Townson
By David Allen and Zachary Woolfe
March 8, 2019
The attention of classical music in America on Thursday was divided between the opposite coasts. By coincidence, new piano concertos by two of the most important composers of our time had their premieres: Thomas Adès’s in Boston and John Adams’s in Los Angeles.
There is a deep and rich tradition in the meeting between a solo pianist and a symphony orchestra. The results can be thunderous battle, delicate sympathy, genial play — sometimes all in the same piece.
Mr. Adès, 48, and Mr. Adams, 72 — both with strongly individual voices, both keenly aware of what’s come before — are ideally suited to take on this looming history, and to contribute to it. David Allen, on the East Coast, and Zachary Woolfe, in the West, heard the results.
Adès: Radically Normal
BOSTON — Mr. Adès has written a piano concerto before, but not a Piano Concerto.
Aside from a brief “Concerto Conciso” (1997) for piano and chamber ensemble, his main foray in the genre to this point has been “In Seven Days” (2008), a depiction of the Creation in seven movements, with optional video installation.
His new and quite wonderful Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which Kirill Gerstein played on Thursday with the composer leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is different. As Mr. Adès has put it, it’s a “proper piano concerto,” along the lines of Mozart or Bartok.
It has no title. It has whistle-worthy themes. It has three movements, fast-slow-fast, marked only by their tempos. It has an opening in sonata form, with a first subject, a second subject, a development section, a recapitulation and a cadenza. It has a poignant, melodic second movement. It has a slithering, cascading finale, with a coda that ends with a cadential sequence Beethoven might have been proud of.
It’s refreshingly, even radically, normal.
Surely it can’t be so? Even if his style is relatively approachable, Thomas Adès still is Thomas Adès, the once-iconoclastic composer of mischievous, sardonic works like “Powder Her Face” (1995), “Totentanz” (2013) and “The Exterminating Angel” (2016).
So you might expect me to point to some ironies I heard running as caustic undercurrents, tugging the whole thing down. Perhaps Mr. Adès is actually dismantling the concerto from within? Perhaps he’s offering a blistering, subversive take on what a frankly modern piano concerto can be, as he did more than 20 years ago for the symphony with “Asyla” (1997)?
If he is, I didn’t hear it.
Instead, Mr. Adès’s 20-minute work comes off as an affectionate, joyous, remarkably uncomplicated tribute to tradition. The writing is labyrinthine, to be sure, but this is a composer so sure of his abilities and influences that there is no sense in this concerto of history as a burden or as something to be thrown off. It is, rather, something to be approached as an equal.
And while plenty of composers talk about how they have thought about the tradition when they write a new concerto, few have placed themselves in it with such breathtaking ease as Mr. Adès does here.
As ever, the craft is astounding, the orchestration ceaselessly brilliant. The voice is wholly his own — dissonant, offbeat, whiplash, wry — even as it whispers to musics past.
Something of the angular, unnerving opening theme bears an uncanny resemblance to the upward, four-note motif that George Gershwin used for the words “I got rhythm.” Something about the slow movement, which pulls at the heart with an open directness that’s unusual in this composer’s music, can be traced to the atmosphere of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, its powerful brass and wind chorale answered with placid wonder by the piano, at least at first.
There’s a funny wink to hyper-Romantic excess when a glockenspiel tinkles above the fray at the end of the finale. The way a phrase will end, a mood shift, brings Rachmaninoff fluttering into mind. The technical demands are Lisztian and worse.
Not that anything seems to daunt Mr. Gerstein, the pianist who asked for the new work while rehearsing “In Seven Days” in Boston seven years ago. He dispatched this concerto with his customary virtuosity and commitment, but for all his double-octave flash, it was his tender voicing of the cluster chords that halo the melody of the slow movement that lingers in the ears. He played as if the concerto had been a friend for years.
These two artists have struck quite the partnership; they play piano duos at Zankel Hall on March 13 and bring the new concerto to Carnegie on March 20. Also on the bill then will be the same pieces performed here in Boston: Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1,” given a raunchy if not quite fluent reading, and a loud, bombastic, thrillingly crude take on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. Be there. DAVID ALLEN
KIRILL GERSTEIN (MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE)
A truly memorable recital in which brilliant technique was used not to blind, but to illuminate.
by Tony Way on June 5, 2019
If great music often bears witness to history, great performances often transcend time and place to take listeners to the emotional core of human striving. Kirill Gerstein’s generous and carefully thought out program was not only a survey of musical monuments to war, heroism and revolt; but it was a deeply involving experience that time and again drew the listener into the emotional world of the chosen composers.
One particularly telling example was Janáček’s sonata, From the Street, which concluded the first half of the program. Gerstein’s finely calibrated timbral control chillingly evoked the streets of Brno where the fatal protest on October 1, 1905, that inspired the sonata took place. Apart from conjuring the bleak, almost disembodied sounds of the second movement, Gerstein excelled in creating maximum tension through the slow but inexorable build-up towards the work’s painful climax.
Such a moving examination of revolt was preceded by more optimistic affirmations of heroism. Liszt’s Transcendental Étude No 7 in E Flat, S.139 was an impressive curtain-raiser in which Gerstein wedded confidence to clarity. Liszt’s use of the full compass of the piano also made it an appropriate work with which to begin the maiden voyage of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s newly acquired Steinway. The rest of the program also confirmed the new instrument’s admirable qualities, including appealing brightness in the upper register and enviable clarity at the other end of the spectrum.
The Liszt led directly into Beethoven’s rarely performed Variations and Fugue in E Flat, Op. 35, sometimes nicknamed the Eroica because they share the same theme as the fourth movement of the eponymous symphony. While Gerstein displayed his ample digital dexterity, he was more focussed on revealing Beethoven’s cleverness and determination not to be hemmed in by the conventions of the theme and variations form. Along the way there were touches of humour and moments of reverie before the expansive fifteenth variation and a crystalline account of the fugue which was delivered, as the composer decreed, with brio.
Liszt’s Funerailles, S.173 began the second half. Gerstein’s alternation of a clenched left fist followed by a vertical karate-style chop certainly allowed the opening procession of bass notes to ring out. Presenting the work as a defiant lament, Gerstein did not shy away from its rawness of emotion, even though its quieter ruminations were touchingly conveyed.
After the last, soft but unapologetic note of the Liszt came the Australian premiere of the Berceuse from Thomas Adès’ opera, The Exterminating Angel. Commissioned for Gerstein and premiered by him earlier this year, this short work is full of lush harmonies and dramatic textures, evoking the doomed love of the opera’s main protagonists. This full blooded work effectively exploited the expressive possibilities of the piano.
The Adès formed an excellent bridge to two little known works of Debussy. Written in 1916, the Élégie is a late work that sounds rather atypical of the composer, making an interesting contrast with Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon (Evenings Lit by Burning Coals), an impressionistic miniature written in the winter of 1916-17 in exchange for some coal.
Continuing to reveal his astute timing, perfectly judged expressive weight and finely honed sense of colour, Gerstein played two movements from the Seven Folk Dances by Armenian composer, Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935). These delicate evocations of folk music in a faraway place again tapped into the program’s subtext of summoning to life past emotions.
Declaring that “the dead are sad enough in their eternal silence,” Ravel dedicated his glittering but elegant Tombeau de Couperin to friends lost in World War I. Gerstein clearly loves this work and gave it a thoroughly ebullient delivery with speeds to match. The perpetual motion of the Prélude shimmered with a lightness of touch, the Fugue shone with transparency and the Forlane radiated Gerstein’s love of jazz. A fresher Rigaudon would be hard to imagine, nor would a more poised Menuet. A mercurial Toccata whose rapid-fire repeated notes put the new piano’s action to the test brought the official program to a tumultuous close.
Gerstein was certainly well placed in the MRC’s Great Performers Series. His brilliant technique never blinded the audience but always served to illuminate the music and point to the common humanity that motivates artistic endeavour. While serious when fronting the audience, Gerstein’s profile at the keyboard reveals dedication and love in equal measure. After two short but stunning virtuoso encores, Gerstein did finally allow himself to smile at the audience – as well he might, for the heartfelt applause was a sincere affirmation of his rare gifts of musical communication.
I enclose two links related to two forthcoming performances at Carnegie Hall by my former student (BM and MM, MSM, 2000), Kirill Gerstein. Let me know if you need more information. You're free to choose your own style to deliver the information to the readers.
Thomas Adès is a fascinating composer and a pianist of considerable talent known for his “incisive, brittle, and commanding performances” (The New York Times).He partners with Kirill Gerstein, lauded by The New York Times for the “spontaneity and scintillating sound” of his playing, in a program of two-piano works.They play a rarely heard Shostakovich arrangement of a Stravinsky work ...
www.carnegiehall.org
A ll the elements are in place for an unforgettable evening of music when a superstar pianist joins one of America’s legendary orchestras conducted by one of most innovative composers of our day. Kirill Gerstein, called “one of the distinguished classical artists of his generation” (The New York Times), performs a new piano concerto by Thomas Adès, the composer of the critically ...
www.carnegiehall.org
Kirill Gerstein
Kirill Gerstein
Kirill Gerstein
Gerstein Tchaikovsky
Listen to Tchaikovsky, Stripped Down to His Intentions
Think you know Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1? Think again.
It’s one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire. But the pianist Kirill Gerstein, as inquisitive as he is talented, argues that what we commonly hear is an overly ostentatious misrepresentation, tarted up after Tchaikovsky’s death.
From Thursday through Feb. 7 with the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Gerstein plays a new critical edition, more delicate and less grandiose. Based on an 1879 version, it has among its sources Tchaikovsky’s own conducting score, which he used in a St. Petersburg concert nine days before his death in 1893. It is therefore closer to the music performed at Carnegie Hall’s opening week in 1891 than anything heard by New Yorkers since. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Gerstein.
Most music lovers would be surprised to hear that such a well-known work isn’t quite what we think it is.
I liken it to those iconic paintings that go to a museum restoration shop. It’s like in a portrait: a wrinkle here, no wrinkle there, an eyebrow tilted in a slightly different way. For anyone who has anxiety, it’s still very much the Tchaikovsky concerto we love, but it perhaps has a different facial expression than we are used to.
How did the usual edition come about?
There’s a tragedy, especially in Russian culture, of geniuses surrounded by less talented well-wishers. Tchaikovsky was one of those, where certain people in his circle — in this case Alexander Siloti, his student and an uncle of Rachmaninoff — thought they knew better. Siloti had been in Europe and studied with Liszt. His tendency toward the superficially brilliant, and some of the traits of 19th-century pianism that are less noble than the tradition generally is in its best manifestations, resulted in these posthumous editorial changes.
Some people like to eat organic food — that’s Tchaikovsky’s version — and some people like to eat everything with sprinkles of MSG. That’s fine, as long as you know that what you’re sprinkling is monosodium glutamate. So if one wants to play Tchaikovsky-Siloti, do that. I think it’s better to do what the composer himself wrote.
Do these changes fundamentally alter the character of the piece, or are they just refinements?
A bit of both. When you take it all together, there are maybe four, five significant changes and about 150, 160 minor discrepancies of articulation and dynamic indications in various orchestra parts, as well as in the piano part.
What it suggests is a fresh look at how the piece is interpreted. Some skeptic might say that the percentage of the notes that are different is probably less than 1 percent, so what’s the big deal? It gives us a chance to revisit something for sincere musical interest, something that is so often relegated to being an old war horse, and frankly not taken seriously enough because the criticism is that it’s so bombastic. It may be better than we are used to. I do find that in all the cases where there is a discrepancy, what the composer wrote is more suitable and fitting to the musical content, to the general poetry of the piece.
Perhaps the most shocking thing is that the famous opening chords are now rolled.
Absolutely. When you enter this great building, if we compare it to a building, not through this pompous entrance but with something clearly more lyrical and less blaring, it obviously casts a different shadow on what follows.
What’s interesting is that so many other things come into focus. Finally the dynamics that Tchaikovsky indicates in the orchestral melody make sense. Usually the pianist enters with these chords as powerfully as he can, to show that he’s got the goods, and the orchestra immediately responds. It’s like a Cold War escalates in the first measures. Now, since the chords are rolled and arpeggiated, one can arpeggiate quicker or slower, and help the flow of the melody in a much more flexible style than what one hears when these chords are symmetrically crashing.
In the usual version, I was always surprised when these big crashing chords suddenly do switch into arpeggios a few measures later. Was he not a good enough composer that he couldn’t figure out how to continue with these block chords, if that’s what he wanted? Years later, I find out that that’s where the editor made the cut back to Tchaikovsky’s own version.
Is there another major change you would pick out?
The one that’s obvious is that in the third movement there is this middle section. We have about 45 seconds of usually unheard music — incidentally, very adventurous harmonically and contrapuntally.
My feeling has always been that it seems like an odd decision, that Tchaikovsky goes into this different mood, and stays in it for 20 seconds, and then he’s back to the previous mood. But it turns out this is a section that’s longer, and so we’re in this mood longer. The third movement really then acquires a more balanced structure.
David Geffen Hall
Price Range: $31-145
Dates:
February 2nd, 2017 Thursday, 7:30 PM
February 3rd, 2017 Friday, 11:00 AM
February 4th, 2017 Saturday, 8:00 PM
February 7th, 2017 Tuesday, 7:30 PM
What a probing and lucid explanation of your point of contention regarding the F versus the Bb. I thank Daniela for bringing it to my attention as I share it with students and with those I know will derive great satisfaction from experiencing the depth of your intellect and the verbal resources at your disposal to bring your point across. I am particularly pleased with your lucid emphasis on the role that cultural backgrounds (German versus Russian) can play in a musician's intuition as to what might be right or wrong. It is indeed a "happy ending" to the story! Trusting Tschaikowsky's musical intuition provides the best outcome!
Just to satisfy my curiosity, I wonder what your decision would be had you found out that Stephen Hough was right! Which note would you play? There have been many cases where great performers have made changes in a score, including specific notes, establishing traditions that depart from a composer's manuscript. Imagine those performers explaining their rationale almost as lucidly and convincingly as you have presented yours (Tschaikowsky's). Would you let your taste and musical intuition decide or would you follow the composer's intentions, regardless?
I am looking forward to listening to those old recordings you list in the article. We must always consider the performance practice and styles of artists that lived closer in time to the composers dates.
I am looking forward to your next performance of this concerto! Are you going to caress the F with a special accent so that the audience can hear it vividly? I hope Stephen Hough will be in the audience! Make him change his mind!
Big hug with much pride!
Solomon
Pianist Attempts to Rescue Rachmaninoff
Kirill Gerstein's Interpretation of the Russian Composer
By CORINNE RAMEY
Oct. 17, 2013 10:30 p.m. ET
Among the classical music cognoscenti, Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has a certain reputation: gushy and opulent, certainly not serious—an old-fashioned romantic who never caught up to the modernism of the 20th century. Pianist (and super-fan) Kirill Gerstein said this isn't the composer's fault, but that of his interpreters.
"There are a lot of performances that are, let's say, uh, very indulgent," Mr. Gerstein said.
When asked to explain "indulgent," he replied: "Well, I'm being polite. There are performances that make him sound like a vodka-soaked Russian sailor."
This Thursday through Saturday, Mr. Gerstein brings his own interpretation of Rachmaninoff—restrained yet virtuosic, nearly classical, presumably nonalcoholic—to the composer's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," which he will perform with the New York Philharmonic and conductor Semyon Bychkov. This is Mr. Gerstein's subscription-series debut with the philharmonic; he previously played summer concerts with the orchestra in New York and Vail, Colo.
Mr. Gerstein has big shoes—or rather, hands, as Rachmaninoff's spanned an octave and a half—to fill; the philharmonic's first performance of the piece was with the composer himself as soloist, at Carnegie Hall in 1934. ("The composition is very difficult, and I should start practicing it," Rachmaninoff wrote.)
The other day, Mr. Gerstein stopped by the building where Rachmaninoff lived from 1926 to 1934, on the corner of West End and 84th Street. After a doorman informed some visitors that, yes, people do occasionally stop by to ask about the composer but, no, he doesn't know the apartment number, Mr. Gerstein headed to a nearby coffee shop to extol the virtues of the man he views as underappreciated and misunderstood.
A treasure trove of information about Rachmaninoff can be found in recordings of the composer playing his own music, Mr. Gerstein said.
"As I revisit these recordings, every year Rachmaninoff plays better and better," he said, laughing. "Which means that every year my own development makes me understand how incredibly good his playing is."
Mr. Gerstein talks about interpreting Rachmaninoff in phrases associated with Mozart: classicism, sense of control, restraint. (Granted, these traits are coupled with "some of the hottest music.")
"When the performance is transparent, when its classicist roots are clear, and yet there is this so-called quote unquote Russian sound, then it's quite clear that he's really a great composer," Mr. Gerstein said.
He said Rachmaninoff's aura is ever-present in the cultural ether in Russia, where Mr. Gerstein, who is 33, was born. He took a detour into the jazz world—he moved to the U.S. at age 14, to study at Boston's Berklee College of Music—but eventually came back to classical music. These days, he splits his time between New York and Stuttgart, Germany, when not on the road.
If Mr. Gerstein were to have met Rachmaninoff, what would he have said?
"I think I'd be happy just to be in his presence, just to feel his strong magnetism," said Mr. Gerstein, who had been talking about the composer with such nonstop vigor that a companion occasionally reminded him to pause and take a bite of a grilled-cheese sandwich. "I'm not sure it would be so necessary to talk."
November 16, 2012 Thomas Adčs led the BSO Thursday night at Symphony Hall.
Most Boston Symphony Orchestra guest conductors come and go discreetly these days, but Thomas Adčs arrived this week a bit like a one-man weather system. On Thursday night, the supremely gifted British composer-conductor-pianist led the first of three performances of a program featuring his own Genesis-inspired piano concerto alongside music of Prokofiev and Sibelius. On Saturday, he’ll conduct his opera “The Tempest” at the Met before leading the evening BSO performance in Symphony Hall. Then on Sunday, for his day of rest, he’ll make a cameo at the Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert to perform the piano four-hands arrangement of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” alongside this week’s BSO soloist, the excellent Russian pianist Kirill Gerstein.
If this kind of week brings any trepidation for Adčs, it was nowhere in evidence at Thursday night’s generously expansive program, which seemed to have a rare thoughtfulness of conception behind it. Building from his own creation-themed piano work “In Seven Days,” Adčs reached out along two axes — toward another creation myth (Sibelius’s mysterious and coolly beautiful tone poem “Luonnotar”) and toward another primally inventive piano concerto from a century ago (Prokofiev’s First). Then the evening ended with Sibelius’s fascinating Sixth Symphony, in a texturally rich, organically drawn performance that seemed to enclose the night in its own elusive poetry.
Opening the evening, Dawn Upshaw was the soloist in “Luonnotar,” its text taken from the Finnish Kalevala epic, relating a strange tale of a wandering goddess who gives birth to the world from the sea. Some singers allow the story to remain on the level of suggestive archaic myth, but Upshaw expertly rendered the solo line with both gleaming tone and a sense of palpable emotional investment.
Adčs’s “In Seven Days” takes a more granular, street-level view of the birth of the world, distributing the seven days from the Genesis story into seven teeming movements, inspired more metaphorically than pictorially by the events they describe (”Chaos-Dark-Light,” “Separation of the waters into sea and sky,” etc.) A circular path is implied by the use of a passacaglia-like form, with the music at the end sending us back to the beginning, but the effect is still more of spiraling forward than any kind of eternal recurrence. Adčs also plays ingeniously with layering music of multiple speeds, with the soloist and portions of the orchestra moving in and out of sync, passing each other like cars in different lanes on a highway. Like so much of Adčs’s music, there is here both intellectual rigor and a sensuality connected with the mercurial surfaces of sound itself. As soloist, Gerstein (reading the score from an iPad assisted by a foot pedal) gave a rhythmically deft, wonderfully rhapsodic account of the solo line.
He was equally impressive in Prokofiev’s brashly virtuosic First Piano Concerto, a work once seen as thumbing its nose at older Romantic sensibilities. Adčs seemed to have a sassy, proudly postmodern take on this early modern score, and Gerstein’s playing had all the aggressive machine-tooled precision and sonic bite the piece requires, together with a suppleness of rhythm that made the performance feel less like interpretation than, well, creation.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
ARTS & LEISURE Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen (excerpt)
BY ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Kirill Gerstein.
Russia has given us Kirill Gerstein, born in 1979, the latest recipient of the distinguished Gilmore Artist Award, whose extraordinary recording of the Liszt Sonata, Schumann’s mercurial “Humoreske” and a fanciful piece by Oliver Knussen on Myrios Classics was one of the best recordings of 2010. In June Mr. Gerstein made his New York Philharmonic debut at a Summertime Classics concert with a boldly interpreted and brilliant account of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. But don’t let his probing musicianship distract you. He is another of those younger technicians who have figured out everything about piano playing.
Concert review: A night of fine Russian chemistry from Toronto Symphony and Kirill Gerstein
Kirill Gerstein performs with the Toronto Symphony and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero on Wednesday at Roy Thomson Hall (Josh Clavir photo).
Familiar favourites sell concert tickets. But as I sat listening to an uncommonly fine performance on Wednesday by Kirill Gerstein, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero and the Toronto Symphopny of the most familiar of piano concertos — Peter Ilytch Tchaikovsky's First — I wondered: Were people appreciating the unfamiliar in this interpretation?
The Roy Thomson Hall audience was warmly appreciative of Gerstein's easy virtuosity and lyrical playing. He made this old warhorse sound fresh and full of life.
Most special to my ears was the exact compatibility between orchestra and soloist, something not even the finest and most seasoned performers can take for granted. Guerrero and Gerstein were on the same page, and it added an extra bit of chemistry to the already fine musicmaking.
Tchaikovsky's Concerto dates from 1875, and is both a vehicle for the virtuoso pianist and an emblem of Romantic-era expression in music. We go home humming the melodies, but it's really in the details under the melodies where the music comes to life. This is where it can soar, or sink.
Gerstein held up his end of the bargain with an overall sparkle that, once lit by the crashing chords that open the piece, crackled away until the finale. Guerrero goosed and coaxed the Toronto Symphony players into following suit, and I heard things I'd never heard before, including some gentle dancing in the second movement.
It is the search for this sort of interpretation that keeps me coming back to the concert hall week after week.
Wednesday's programme was a short Toronto Symphony Afterworks affair, beginning at 6:30 p.m. and ending less than 90 minutes later. The orchestra players arrived on stage in their more casual attire — plain black shirts, trousers and dresses. Patrons could bring a drink along to their seat, and CBC Radio's Tom Allen was our breezy, witty host.
It was all so very howyadoin? casual, but the artistry on display was as serious as could be.
Wednesday's companion piece was the Russian Easter Festival Overture by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It's a bit of a sprawl that tries to pick up momentum, but keeps bogging down. It's not the world's finest composition, but it is a fabulous showcase of an orchestra's — and a conductor's — abilities.
It was a treat to see and hear Guerrero in charge of such a tight, beautifully balanced ensemble.
These two Russian pieces repeat on Thursday and Saturday nights alongside the 1943 Concerto for Orchestra by Béla Bartók — truly a symphonic showpiece. Given what we heard on Wednesday night, this should be one of the highlights of the season.
Note that Kirill Gerstein, one of the great young pianists of the day, returns to Toronto on Dec. 8 for a solo recital at Koerner Hall that showcases both his jazz as well as classical backgrounds. Details here.
John Terauds
20 (PLUS) QUESTIONS WITH: Pianist Kirill Gerstein
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
By Albert Imperato
Kirill Gerstein, recently named the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award, took time to lend his thoughts to our question and answer series. The young dynamo will make his Boston Symphony debut on July 30 at the Tanglewood Festival.
**
One of today’s most intriguing young musicians, Kirill Gerstein was named the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award in January 2010. This prestigious award – described by the New York Times as “music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grants’ – is given every four years to a pianist of exceptional ability and profound musicianship who is deemed capable of sustaining a prominent international career. As the Boston Globe affirms, the Russian-born pianist is “on the fast track to a major career, and he deserves to be.”
Born in 1979 in Voronezh, Russia, Gerstein attended one of the country’s special music schools for gifted children and taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents’ extensive record collection. He came to the U.S. at 14 to continue his jazz piano studies as the youngest student ever to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music, before turning his focus to classical music, first at the Manhattan School of Music with Solomon Mikowsky, and then with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. Besides the 2010 Gilmore Artist Award, Gerstein was awarded First Prize at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, received a 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award, and was chosen as Carnegie Hall’s “Rising Star” for the 2005-06 season. Most recently, he was a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant. He became an American citizen in 2003 and is currently a professor of piano at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart.
Following a season that included his debuts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Gerstein will make his debut with the Boston Symphony on July 30 at the Tanglewood Festival.
1. A few works of classical music that you adore:
Rachmaninoff Vespers; Schubert Octet; Bach Orchestral Suites (well most Bach actually) 2. Classical music recordings that you treasure:
Busoni's acoustic recordings; Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata with Bartók and Szigeti; Rachmaninoff’s piano recordings – 10 CDs on RCA – the best $99 I spent on recordings. 3. Favorite non-classical musicians and/or recordings:
Brad Mehldau Places; Sting’s Dowland recording is fantastic; Keith Jarrett; Chick Corea; Oscar Peterson; Ella Fitzgerald; Prince; Miles Davis 4. Music that makes you cry – any genre:
Music triggers many deep emotions in me – crying as a response to these emotions usually is not the outlet my body chooses. 5. Definitely underrated work(s) or composer (s):
Busoni, Haydn and Schubert. Yes, Haydn and Schubert I think are even MORE astounding than often thought. Liszt is not taken as seriously as he ought to be. And many more… I'd need to have more space to defend my favorites. But then comes my question: "underrated by WHOM??" 6. Possibly overrated work(s) or composer (s):
I think each piece has a certain number of hearings in it (ok, for some pieces if it lies in single-digit numbers). So, I'd equate overrated with overplayed. 7. Live music performance (s) you attended – any genre – that you’ll never forget:
Radu Lupu playing Brahms 1 at opening of Carnegie’s season with CSO and Barenboim five or six years ago; Grigory Sokolov's recital with Baroque keyboard music; Steven Isserlis' Schubert Arpeggione in Verbier; Andras Schiff's Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in Salzburg. Also, live bands playing Gypsy music in Budapest and a glass harmonica virtuoso on a street in Vienna. 8. A few relatively recent films you love:
I watch most of my movies on the airplane. A bit like fast food for the mind, paired to airplane food for the body. Inglorious Bastards is bold and provocative; I had fun watching the new Sherlock Holmes movie. And I can't wait to see Pianomania – a new German documentary film about a piano tuner. 9. A few films you consider classics:
I am not a film aficionado – I usually watch to be entertained. Provocation that "classics" provide, I get elsewhere… 10. A few books that are important to you (and why):
Miguel de Unamuno: The Tragic Sense of Life – I think it’s such an honest and yet believing look at life and religion and the necessity of belief. I love E.T.A. Hoffmann's fantastical world and find his moods very musical. Rilke's poetry always moves me. 11. Thing(s) about yourself that you’re most proud of:
Of being able to learn and develop. 12. Thing(s) about yourself that you’re embarrassed by:
That I can't dance (unless I drink enough and then either I am not embarrassed or I can dance…) 13. Three things you can’t live without:
Music, food and beverages, blackberry 14. “When I want to get away from it all I…”
Play the piano 15. “People are surprised to find out that I…”
Studied Jazz 16. “My favorite cities are…”
New York, Vienna, Budapest, Sydney, Tel Aviv 17. “I have a secret crush on…”
I don't have one. 18. “My most obvious guilty pleasure is…”
I don’t feel guilty for my pleasures, but I do feel guilty for not getting up as early as I planned to every morning. 19. “I’d really love to meet…”
Brad Mehldau, John Stewart and Sarah Silverman 20. “I never understood why…”
Piano benches don't have an indication of the direction you are adjusting them in – up or down is always the question…
BONUS QUESTION: 21. Question you wish someone would ask you (and the answer to that question):
Q: Shall I turn you in to a hazelnut?
A: No, thanks
Gerstein's Winning Ways
By STUART ISACOFF
Kalamazoo, Mich.
May 27, 2010
'Let the sky rain potatoes," declared Shakespeare's Falstaff, bidding the gods to shower him with fertility and good fortune. These days, he might simply have asked for greenbacks. But if he were a pianist, the request would likely be for a Gilmore Award—a prize worth $300,000 and given to a pianist every four years by a secret jury that assesses candidates without their knowledge.
Such riches don't normally fall from the sky. But for Kirill Gerstein, age 30, it might seem that way. In January, he was announced as this year's Gilmore winner. Then in April, Lincoln Center conferred its prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, worth $25,000. For a pianist with less than marquee status, it was a jackpot of huge proportions.
Not that he was completely unknown. Back in 2002, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., had given him its "Young Artist" Award, in recognition of promising talent (he is the first to have been honored in both Gilmore categories). The year before, he had earned top prize in the Arthur Rubinstein competition in Tel Aviv. And in the 2005-06 season, he was named a "Rising Star" by Carnegie Hall. But his recent double win in Kalamazoo and New York has placed him in the major leagues. And it invites curiosity about just how good he is.
The journey has been interesting, and not always easy. Born in 1979 in Voronezh, a Russian town about 300 miles to the south of Moscow, he claims that his mother, a teacher specializing in the musical development of young children, used him to test her theories. "Music emerges from the fog of nonremembering for me," he says, by way of explaining that he has no recollection of a time without it. Even at the age of 3, there was ear training, learning notation, singing and playing piano—"formatting my young brain for those relationships that are now for me as natural as breathing. When I hear a note," reports Mr. Gerstein, "I see its name, where it is on the keyboard, where it is on the music staff—it's an instantaneous link."
Yet he wasn't at all certain that he wanted to be a pianist. "I read a lot," he remembers of his youth. "I didn't feel confined to the instrument." Then he met a teacher who spurred his enthusiasm for the piano with new ideas about playing and practicing. He was 10.
The real adventure began at 11, when he won a Bach competition in Poland. He had been tinkering with jazz improvisation, so officials took him to a jazz club and later encouraged him to attend some workshops given by faculty members of Boston's Berklee School of Music (in the workshops, "I was 12, and everyone else was in their 20s," he remarks). When the school's vice president, vibraphonist Gary Burton, performed in St. Petersburg, Mr. Gerstein served as his interpreter.
"The next time I went to Poland for a jazz workshop," Mr. Gerstein remembers, "I was asked why I hadn't answered Gary Burton, who wrote three times inviting me to Berklee. Well, I hadn't received any of his letters; they had conveniently disappeared. Apparently, someone in Russia thought it wasn't right for me." Finally, in 1993, Berklee offered him a full scholarship, provided that one of his parents joined him in Boston. "My mother made the sacrifice. We had some financial help from combined Jewish philanthropies," he recalls, "but it was tough."
He worked intensely for three years before reaching a crossroads: "Did I want to continue learning how to be the on-the-spot inventor, or did I want to continue peering into Beethoven, Bach and Rachmaninoff, and things that they, as great improvisers, took a year of self-editing and torture to write down?" He chose the latter, studied with Solomon Mikowsky at the Manhattan School of Music, then pursued additional lessons with Alexis Weissenberg in Switzerland, Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. So the classics won out. But, he says, jazz has served him well. "The sense of timing, the enhanced attention to harmony—you hear things in a different way," he explains. "Through jazz you approach classical music with the sense that the score is not written in stone, but instead represents a symbolization of a certain possibility."
The results could be heard at the Gilmore's closing Gala Concert on May 8, when Mr. Gerstein presented both his "Russian side and jazzy upbringing" by performing Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."
As could be expected, Mr. Gerstein has a blazing technique, including a wonderful command of color and nuance, and he is a deep thinker. In some ways, however, those intellectual concerns seemed to lead him astray in the Tchaikovsky, which he views not as a roaring Romantic blockbuster, but as a work that belongs more to the Germanic tradition. Occasionally, in place of the expected sweep and grandeur, he lingered pensively over passages, exploring them at the expense of the work's forward impetus. In fairness, the Kalamazoo Symphony was not the best of partners—a greater sense of collaboration was needed to make this work. And perhaps Mr. Gerstein is really not so far off in his view of how the piece should be interpreted: it was, after all, given its premiere by Hans von Bülow, whose playing was so cerebral that one critic described him as a "musical refrigerator." The Gershwin was magnificent, with a sense of playfulness and stylistic flair seldom encountered. The evening was an undeniable success.
Following the concert, Mr. Gerstein was expecting to fly back the next day to Stuttgart, Germany, where he teaches at the Musikhochschule. Instead, due to a last-minute cancellation by former Gilmore winner Ingrid Fliter, Mr. Gerstein took the 7 a.m. flight to New York to serve as her replacement at Town Hall. He was well received. "Ah, youth," said someone associated with the festival. And talent.
Mr. Isacoff is on the faculty of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music (SUNY).
Gilmore Winner Shows His Stripes
By George Loomis
MusicalAmerica.com
May 7, 2010
KALAMAZOO, MI -- The Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival always presents a cluster of the world's top pianists, but even the most starry among them yields pride of place when the event, held here every two years, follows the naming of a new Gilmore Artist Award winner. In January, Russian-born Kirill Gerstein became the sixth such winner in the festival's 20-year history. And on May 3, just past the current festival's midpoint, the general public was afforded a chance to measure its reactions against the decision makers when Gerstein played a solo recital in Chenery Auditorium. His interesting choice of repertoire and his searching playing supplied few, if any, grounds for dissension.
There was a bit of drama in the lead-up to the recital, in that Oliver Knussen was still putting the finishing touches on “Ophelia's Last Dance,” a Gilmore Festival commission, only days before its premiere. But he finished the six-minute piece just in time to e-mail the final pages to Gerstein several days before showtime.
Understandably, Gerstein played from the score for this alluring piece, which offers immediate melodic gratification along with a more serious musical undercurrent. After a gentle Impressionistic preface stressing the piano's upper register, the principal theme is presented—a flowing theme in even notes that sounds a bit like a Chopin waltz spiced with Prokofiev melodic inflections and shifting meters. A middle section brings thicker textures, fragmentation and forthright dissonance. The return leads to an unobtrusive coda and a rather abrupt ending. Gerstein played the theme with a beguiling fluency but also ensured that the piece's more forbidding elements registered with due expressivity.
Schumann's Humoreske, in B flat, Op. 20, also has a kind of two-sidedness as it darts from dreamy lyricism to virtuosic turbulence. Both aspects were brilliantly caught by Gerstein, right from the opening melody, which he projected with songfulness and an affecting sense of rumination. Here and in similar passages you sometimes sensed that he was playing just for himself, oblivious to the presence of an audience. Bravura passages flew by excitingly but also with a clarity born of a remarkable ear for textural balance. Gerstein made it a treat to hear this infrequently played work.
The pianist is apparently a big fan of Busoni and offered two of the composer’s so-called sonatinas, No. 5 brevis “in signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni” and No. 6 super “Carmen” (“Carmen” Fantasy). The pre-existent material of each is utterly different—themes from Bach's Keyboard Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and Bizet's “Carmen,” respectively—but the treatment is much the same. Sometimes the source is presented relatively straight, sometimes it is coupled with Late Romantic or dissonant harmonies, sometimes it serves simply as the basis for free creative flights by Busoni. Gerstein emphasized the artistic validity of all three approaches by giving them equal interpretive weight. The Bach sonatina in particular had a dreamy, even improvisatory quality, which was established in the prelude and also colored the beginning of the fugue. Again, overt showmanship was virtually nil, even though technical challenges—deftly surmounted—came early and often.
The only well known item on the program was Liszt's Sonata in B minor, and it was played with interpretive depth and remarkable polish. All three of the principal themes were compellingly handled. The big theme in octaves was incisively stated yet without undue percussiveness. The other big theme, with chordal accompaniment, was sonorous and ardent. And the poignant lyrical theme, which begins with repeated notes, sang out exquisitely. Gerstein's command of the piece's architecture was sure as ideas flowed logically from one to the next. And he showed an almost limitless capacity to achieve nuanced shading and coloristic effects. One example of his remarkable finger control came at the very end, when each of the five closing chords, marked pianissimo, emerged perfectly voiced and with its own character.
The 1,900-seat Chenery Auditorium, a recently restored gem dating from 1924, is located in what once was Kalamazoo's Central High School, suggesting that old schools, like old movie theaters, may be places to look for treasurable classical music venues.
Like the MacArthur Foundation “genius” awards, the Gilmore Artist Award is supposed to come out of the blue. A six-person artistic advisory committee, whose members and operations are kept secret until the award is announced, makes the decision after an exhaustive evaluation process that includes listening to CDs (preferably of live performances) and surreptitiously attending concerts.
Where MacArthur winners are free to take the money and pursue a lifestyle of their choosing (including a reclusive one that may have helped them win the prize in the first place) the Gilmore wants its winner out there on the concert stage. The ideal recipient is “an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses broad and profound musicianship and charisma and who desires and can sustain a career as a major international concert artist.” The Gilmore Award brings a cash prize of $300,000, $250,000 of which is to be spent, with the Gilmore's approval, on projects that advance the winner's career, and the rest as he or she chooses.
Despite the absence of an age limit, then, the preferred Gilmore winner will be someone who looks destined for a big career but is not there yet, which means that it is likely to come at a particular point in his or her development. The Gilmore scored handily with prior winners Leif Ove Andsnes (1998) and Piotr Anderszewski (2002), although there were rumblings that Andsnes’ career was already well along when he won, even if he was only 28. Ingrid Fliter (2006) may be on track to join her illustrious predecessors in the international arena. The two earlier winners, David Owen Norris (1991) and Ralf Gothóni (1994), for what ever reasons, personal choice among them, took different career paths.
Gerstein, 30, has already had a number of notable successes but is no household name. He took first prize at the Artur Rubinstein Competition in 2001, won a Gilmore Young Artists Award in 2002, was named Carnegie Hall's “rising star” for 2005-06, and has played with leading orchestras and at leading festivals. He has the credentials the Gilmore wants. From all appearances, he is both worthy of the award and someone who can benefit from it. I look forward to hearing him again.
The artistic advisory committee that chose Gerstein consisted of Daniel Gustin, director of the Gilmore Festival, plus Curtis Price, Don Michael Randel, Ann Schein, Matias Tarnopolsky and Sherman van Solkema.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Mellon and Fisher Grants Awarded
Compiled by RACHEL LEE HARRIS
The Play Company, an Off Broadway troupe dedicated to producing new writing for the stage, has been awarded a $135,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Producers said in a statement that the money, to be dispersed over three years, would help maintain the company’s artistic initiatives as well as support its cash reserves. The Play Company, now in its 10th season, recently concluded a run of Toshiki Okada’s “Enjoy.” ... The violist David Aaron Carpenter and the pianists Kirill Gerstein, Yuja Wang and Joyce Yang have been selected to receive Career Grants from the Avery Fisher Artist Program. The honor comes with a stipend of $25,000 for each performer. The recipients were announced at a special event at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, at which Mr. Carpenter, Ms. Wang and Ms. Yang played. Their performances will be broadcast on WQXR-FM on May 12 at 9 p.m. Mr. Gerstein was unable to participate because of a previously scheduled performance.
Dutoit's steady hand keeps Russian epic in check
March 6, 2010
Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 ("The Year 1905") is a programmatic symphony evoking a massacre of unarmed workers by soldiers in czarist St. Petersburg in that year, a key event in modern Russian history. It has always divided the composer's admirers. Is it an artifact of socialist realism designed to suck up to the Soviet cultural apparatchiks? A coded indictment of Stalinist tyranny? A film score without the film? Or is it something deeper and more complex?
I'm not convinced that guest conductor Charles Dutoit set out to argue any single point of view in his gripping performance of the hourlong work with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at Orchestra Hall. He seemed to be telling the audience, in effect, that amid the flaws and fustian this sprawling symphonic epic contains some of Shostakovich's most powerful music, and here it is: You decide what it's really about.
Not for Dutoit the almost unbearable emotional identification and intensity the composer's friend and colleague Mstislav Rostropovich brought to the 11th Symphony during the CSO's Shostakovich Festival in 1999. But many roads lead to Rome, and Dutoit's steady, organizing hand was just the thing to keep this sometimes blatant and unruly music from going off the track.
His control of dynamics, tempo and structure was impressive from the start, where the music's frozen stillness carried an eerie expectancy. The abrupt leaps from the ferocious battle music of the second movement ("The Ninth of January") to the numbed quiet of the third ("Eternal Memory") were carefully controlled so that the music built and released tension organically, with no loss of momentum.
Too bad the rudely cough-happy crowd didn't reserve its hacking for the tumultuous finale ("The Alarm"), where it wouldn't have disrupted a thing.
The score is made to order for the CSO's pumped corporate musculature. The brass and percussion players dug into their parts for maximum sonic impact, and the deep tolling of a big Russian church bell really did sound like a tocsin. Scott Hostetler's English horn sang a poignant lament to quiet all the sound and fury that had preceded it.
There was more Russian music to begin the concert — Rachmaninov's ever-popular Second Piano Concerto, in a wonderfully impassioned performance by Kirill Gerstein, making his CSO subscription series debut.
One could tell just from the finely graded series of chords with which the work begins why the young Russian virtuoso won the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award for 2010. Gerstein handled them like a master, and they launched a reading of rhapsodic intensity and big-hearted Russian lyricism. He wowed the audience not by indulging in cheap tricks or self-regarding sensationalism but by treating this music seriously, like the splendid romantic masterpiece it is.
The outer movements were a feast of powerful chords, whirling runs and scintillating passage work that generated palpable excitement in the house. Even more impressive was the sensitivity with which the pianist spun the cantabile of the slow movement, applying plenty of rubato but always with a firm line to support it, in close dialogue with solo instruments like Gregory Smith's supple clarinet. The orchestral support was just as caring throughout, not least the dark-chocolate coloration supplied by principal oboe Eugene Izotov.
The CSO has released its Symphony Center Presents concert schedule for the 2010-11 season.
Orchestras visiting Orchestra Hall next season are the Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev; the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Most conducting; Yuri Temirkanov with his St. Petersburg Philharmonic; and the Orchestre National de France under Daniel Gatti.
Chamber music concerts will be given by the duo of violinist Pinchas Zukerman and pianist Yefim Bronfman, and the trio of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax and clarinetist Anthony McGill. Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky will perform a Russian song recital. Violist Yuri Bashmet and pianist Evgeny Kissin will team up for another duo recital, and a vocal quartet led by baritone Thomas Quasthoff will perform Brahms and Schumann.
The piano series will comprise recitals by Andras Schiff, Murray Perahia, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Paul Lewis, Yuja Wang, Leif Ove Andsnes, Maurizio Pollini, Arnaldo Cohen and Kissin.
CSO: Gilmore pianist Gerstein's debut, Dutoit's steady hand in mixed Russian works
Saturday, 06 March 2010
Here is my Saturday March 6 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday March 4, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Charles Dutoit and pianist Kirill Gerstein.
CSO Russian bill of mixed but popular works draws cheers, raises questions
New Gilmore Artist Gerstein makes his downtown subscription debut with veteran Dutoit
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
There is music that is not truly great and yet is understandably loved by many concertgoers. Usually these works falls into one of two categories -- lyrical, tuneful pieces with virtuosic opportunities for soloists and bombastic sonic showcases. Much such music comes from Russia.
I can be a sucker for the first group. A great Rachmaninoff piano concerto played by a great pianist or a young artist on his or her way to greatness can be both a thrill and a cause for all manner of reverie and nostalgia. I’m a partisan of the Third Concerto, perhaps the last great throwback work of its kind: lush and moving, a marriage of killer melodies with thoroughbred-level keyboard racing, with no acknowledgment of the dramatic changes in the musical and cultural worlds around it. What must it have been like to hear its composer, one of history’s great pianists, play this with the New York Philharmonic and Gustav Mahler in 1910 when Mahler had already composed his entire catalog?
[Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein, left, gave a smashing performance of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night.]
Perhaps because of some tunes that were turned into various pop songs, it’s the C minor Second Concerto of 1900-01 that was the most popular for decades. Kirill Gerstein, 30, the 2010-13 Gilmore Artist, chose it for his Chicago Symphony Orchestra downtown subscription debut Thursday night. (He has played the Tchaikovsky First at Ravinia and chamber music at The University of Chicago Presents.)
A highly intellectual, Russian-born musician with training and experience in jazz as well as classical, Gerstein gave a performance that was constantly alive rhythmically and brilliantly exposed the phenomenal demands this half-hour work puts on a soloist. He kept it from becoming sappy and blended original insights with Rachmaninoff’s goals. Swiss guest conductor Charles Dutoit was, as is his wont, a perfect accompanist.
The Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 of 1957 is of the second category: sound and fury and mournfulness played endlessly for more than an hour, drawing cheers from fans of loud brass playing and percussion. It’s the classical equivalent of arena rock. With one difference. As Soviet music expert Gerard McBurney correctly writes in the program notes, this is a work, subtitled “The Year 1905,” that crystallizes Shostakovich’s two faces: official servant of the Communist Party leadership and signal waver to the dissident and oppressed in Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet society. It simultaneously commemorates the slaughter of innocent peasants by the Tsarist police in the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, officially marks the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik coup in 1917, and on another level protests the oppression of the state.
One cannot deny the power that this piece must hold for those who lived through the tragedy of those years. But the work’s actual musical value has eluded even many Shostakovich boosters over the years. As he does with any large, complex score, Dutoit made the piece move and even seem logical and balanced. English horn Scott Hostetler won a well-deserved ovation, a battery of percussion -- including a bell to wake the dead -- was employed to the hilt, and even the violas got to take a section bow.
A further note on the Rachmaninoff: When a senior player is working through a crisis, respect and patience are appropriate. When several sections of the winds are without top leadership, however, you have an institutional problem. Soloists are entitled to proper support, and CSO audiences to playing at the highest level. If it had not been for the lead oboe and bassoon, the key wind contributions would have been a total disaster. It’s a further credit to the talented Gerstein that he seemed unfazed by the strange sounds that came his, and our, way.
Gilmore winner Gerstein makes electrifying CSO debut with Rachmaninoff
Fri Mar 05, 2010
By Bryant Manning
Kirill Gerstein, 2010 Gilmore Artist, made his CSO debut in music of Rachmaninoff Thursday.
It didn’t take long for Chicago to get on the touring radar of this year’s Gilmore Artist Award winner Kirill Gerstein, who received the prestigious quadrennial award in January. The Russian-American pianist, who divides his time between Massachusetts and Germany, joins an elite roster that includes Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes. If the Gilmore can claim even an ounce of responsibility for those pianists’ astonishing successes, then things portend very well for the 30-year-old Gerstein.
His electrifying performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 Thursday night seemed a proper Orchestra Hall christening, replete with all the virtuosic heroics a $300K pianist should have at the ready. The Chicago Symphony and guest conductor Charles Dutoit were his energized partners who would, on occasion, overpower him as in the first movement.
Technically awesome from start to finish, Gerstein delivered a mostly temperate account of the showstopping concerto. Tempos were snappy and the pianist kept a cool distance from Rachmaninoff’s heart-on-sleeve sentimentality. It was a refreshing change for once to allow the music’s pathos to emerge naturally from within. The song-like Adagio had a sincere directness of expression and those thick, high E-major chords that punctuate the closing crescendo were most sublimely controlled.
Dutoit struck a perfect balance in the final Allegro scherzando, with his soloist in sparkling form. Gerstein plays with a real charisma and given his affinity for jazz, it will be a treat to soon hear him in a trans-Atlantic program.
It was not a night to remember for various section leaders. Principal horn Dale Clevenger, assistant principal flutist Richard Graef and even the usually infallible trumpeter Christopher Martin all slipped up in solo roles. And a dropped trombone mute seemed to echo on for hours.
Still, these individual kinks couldn’t erase from memory Dutoit’s searing account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 (The Year 1905). While written in a post-Stalin world to celebrate the Soviet regime’s beginnings, Shostakovich relies heavily on nine revolutionary songs for his thematic material. The melodies are peculiarly beautiful and yet it is hard to find many reasons to rejoice in this fiercely nationalistic music.
The tensile extended introduction forms a vast sonic image of stillness, broken up only by the endless rumbles of Vadim Karpinos’ timpani. And in the bleak-as-night Adagio, the only signs of life are a wayward pizzicato.
But it’s the ear-shattering bravura of the second and last movements that lingers in the mind. (The use of twin bells in the finale, while arguably gratuitous, is a chilling touch.) Here the violent, blood-sodden character of this music stirs with its savage power, and the CSO braved every challenge like the world-class ensemble they are, in a performance that harkened back to the Solti days of yore.
Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein wins Gilmore Artist Award from Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival
Published: Thursday, January 07, 2010, 7:00 AM Updated: Thursday, January 07, 2010, 3:24 PM
By
Linda S. Mah | lmah@mlive.com
The Kalamazoo Gazette
KALAMAZOO — The Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival today named Kirill Gerstein the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award.
Kalamazoo Gazette fileKirill Gerstein, right, performs with Christopher Taylor during the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in 2004.
Gerstein, 30, is a pianist who many Kalamazoo concertgoers will recognize. In 2001, he appeared in the Gilmore Rising Stars recital series. He was named a Gilmore Young Artist in 2002 and appeared at the Gilmore Festivals in 2002 and 2004, which is the same year he performed with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra.
“It is a great honor and very humbling,” Gerstein said in a phone call from New York on Wednesday. “This has been quite a wonderful rush.”
The prize, which is announced every four years, comes with $50,000 in cash to be used at the artist’s discretion. An additional $250,000 is made available to the winner for projects and activities to enhance his or her musicianship and career.
Gerstein said he has not yet made plans for the prize money.
“The financial prize is an invitation to come up with future creative ideas. It is like knowing you have a box of chocolates waiting for you to enjoy the contents,” he said. Daniel R. Gustin, director of the Gilmore Festival, has been familiar with Gerstein’s musicianship for almost a decade. Gustin first met him when Gerstein performed as part of the Carnegie Hall Millennium Project and worked with him as a Gilmore Young Artist.
2010 GILMORE ARTIST
Name: Kirill Gerstein Age: 30 Hometown: Voronezh, Russia. Now divides his time between New York and Stuttgart, Germany. Major prizes: 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, 2005-2006 Carnegie Hall “Rising Star.” Recordings: “Kirill Gerstein Plays Bach, Beethoven, Scriabin, Gershwin/Wild” (Oehms, 2003), “Kirill Gerstein — Piano recital (Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninov)” (CAvi-music, 2006). On the Gilmore selection process: “It makes a lot of sense to observe the creature — in this case a pianist — in his natural habitat, when they don’t know they are being observed or considered for one thing or another. They do it over a period of time, so they can see something of how a pianist is in his or her day-to-day musical life and musical work. It is a very elaborate process to go through, but there is no other way to do that.”
Gilmore Selection Committee: • Daniel R. Gustin, director, Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. • Matias Tarnopolsky, until recently the artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic, and now the director of Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley. • Sherman Van Solkema, professor of music and retired chairman of the Grand Valley State University music department. • Ann Schein, concert pianist and teacher Don Michael Randel, president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation. • Curtis Price, until recently the president of the Royal Academy of Music, London, and now warden, New College, Oxford University, United Kingdom.
Gilmore Artists • David Owen Norris, England, 1991 • Ralf Gothoni, Finland, 1994 • Leif Ove Andsnes, Norway, 1998 • Piotr Anderszewski, Poland, 2002 • IIngrid Fliter, Argentina, 2006
“He’s always been one of the Gilmore Young Artists that’s stood out,”
said Gustin, who noted that Gerstein is the first Gilmore Young Artist
to go on to become a Gilmore Artist.
“I’ve seen him grow and spread his wings. He’s taken on new pieces,” Gustin said. “I’ve seen him be valued and championed by other artists, singers and composers.”
Gerstein’s award was made through the Gilmore’s unique and highly secretive three-year selection process.
The process begins with the five-person selection committee seeking nominations from the musical community. That often results in at least 500 nominees, Gustin said. The committee listens to recordings of nominees to create a list of finalists. In the last year of selection, committee members secretly attend performances by the artists.
“His maturity and musicianship have deepened over the years that I’ve observed him,” Gustin said. “He’s developed a deeper, more thoughtful, more probing relationship to his music.”
Gerstein was born in Voronezh, Russia, and began studying piano at an early age with his mother. He taught himself jazz, and that led to an invitation to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music — where at age 14 he was the youngest student to ever attend the school.
Throughout his jazz studies, however, he continued to study classical repertoire and eventually decided to focus his talents in the world of classical music.
“I felt at the time, if I had to choose the role of spontaneous
improvising or studying what great minds had carefully worked out over
a year or two, the intricacies of a creation like that appealed to me
more as a life concentration,” said Gerstein, who became a U.S. citizen
in 2003.
Gerstein earned his bachelor’s and master’s of music degrees by the age of 20 from the Manhattan School of Music. He has studied with Solomon Mikowsky, Dmitri Bashkirov and Ferenc Rados.
Since then, he has maintained a busy international performing career.
In North America, he has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the symphonies in San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis and Vancouver. His European engagements have included dates with the Munich, Rotterdam and Royal Philharmonics. He also is an active recitalist and chamber musician. His musical collaborations have included work with artists such as violinist Joshua Bell, clarinetist Martin Frost, flutist Emmanuel Pahud and cellist Steven Isserlis.
During the Gilmore Festival, which runs April 17 to May 8, Gerstein will perform a recital on May 3, give a master class on May 5 and play in the festival closing concert on May 8.
“It is quite an honor to be recognized in this way by the Gilmore panel and to become a part of this group of very few, selected pianists,” Gerstein said.
Alumnus Kirill Gerstein Wins Gilmore Artist Award
Kirill Gerstein has been named the sixth winner of the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist, as announced in the New York Times. The prize is administered by the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, for which he will give a recital in May. An anonymous committee reviews recordings of the nominees and secretly attends concerts of the performers, who rarely know that they are being considered. Gerstein, a first-prize winner in the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, also won a Gilmore Young Artist Award, worth $25,000, in 2002. He was chosen as Carnegie Hall’s “Rising Star” for the 2005–06 season.
Gerstein studied at MSM with Solomon Mikowsky, earning a Bachelor’s degree in 1999 and a Master’s in 2000. As winner of the School’s concerto competition in
1997, he performed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with
the Symphony under the baton
of Jerzy Semkow. He also appeared
as soloist with the Symphony in 2001, performing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in D Minor with Zden?ek Mácal conducting.
Mr. Gerstein has a busy concert schedule and plays with major U.S. and European orchestras. Highlights of Gerstein’s 2009–10 season include his debuts with the Chicago Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well as re-engagements with the Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, and Oregon orchestras. Internationally he appears with the NHK Symphony Orchestra under Charles Dutoit in Tokyo, tours Switzerland with the State Symphony of Russia, and performs with the NDR Orchestra Hannover in Austria and Italy. Past engagements have included performances with such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Arts Centre Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra, as well as such prominent European orchestras as the Munich, Rotterdam, and Royal Philharmonics, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Zurich Tonhalle, and the Finnish and Swedish Radio Orchestras. He also collaborates in chamber groups with musicians such as cellist Steven Isserlis, violinist Joshua Bell, and flutist Emmanuel Pahud. He made his Salzburg Festival debut playing solo and two piano works with András Schiff in 2008. As the Times put it, “reviews have generally glowed.”
Mr. Gerstein has a few possibilities in mind for the Gilmore prize money: commissioning a work; carrying out
a project that marries piano playing to a visual display or dance element; recording the music of Busoni; or combining his roots in jazz with
his classical career. (Before coming
to study at MSM he attended the Berklee College of Music.) Gerstein says of Manhattan School of Music, “Through its excellent teachers
and warm atmosphere, it taught me many essential skills as a performer
and person.”
Young Pianist Thrust Into Elite Group
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: January 6, 2010
Odd, the pianist Kirill Gerstein thought. A music critic from Houston was coming to interview him in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Gerstein’s manager had arranged the meeting, at the Omni Hotel’s J bar, to coincide with a run of concerts last November. Might as well meet the writer, the pianist thought.
Kirill Gerstein, a naturalized American citizen of Russian origin, is the latest recipient of the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award.
But instead of a critic waiting at the bar, it was the man from the Gilmore festival. And in his hand was an envelope proclaiming Mr. Gerstein the latest winner of one of the arts world’s great windfalls: the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist.
“I swallowed it,” Mr. Gerstein said of the mischievous ruse in an interview in New York on Tuesday. “I was so amazed. I went kind of blank for a minute.”
Mr. Gerstein, 30, is the sixth member of an elite and eclectic group of pianists that includes Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes. He will receive $50,000 outright to spend as he wishes and can apply the rest to anything that furthers his career or artistry, subject to the Gilmore festival’s approval. He will give a recital at the festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., on May 3.
The award, which will officially be announced on Thursday morning, is music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants. And it is something of an anti-Van Cliburn Competition, a tacit rejection of the hoopla, bloodlust and horse-race quality of the international competition circuit.
It is administered by the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo. Nominations are solicited; an anonymous committee sifts through commercial and noncommercial recordings, some of them surreptitiously obtained; committee members secretly slip into dozens of concerts — sometimes keeping to the balcony or hiding their faces with programs — to assess the performers, who are not supposed to know they are under consideration.
Mr. Gerstein, a naturalized American citizen of Russian origin, said he had no immediate plans to spend the money. “I’m looking forward to fantasizing with Dan the things that can be done,” he said, referring to Daniel R. Gustin, the festival’s director and the supposed music critic from Houston.
Mr. Gerstein ran through a few ideas: commissioning a work; carrying out a project that marries piano playing to a visual display or dance element; or combining his roots in jazz with his classical career. Mr. Gerstein also has long-term ambitions to record the music of Busoni, whom he calls the James Joyce of composition for his modernist, magpie tendencies.
Previous winners have used the money to take a sabbatical for practicing, to hire a publicist or commission works and, in almost all cases, to buy a piano. Mr. Gerstein ruled out the last option. He owns five pianos. They are lodged at his family home in Newton, Mass., and his residence in Stuttgart, Germany, where he teaches at the conservatory. “I think I should not be buying one for a while,” he said dryly.
His instruments include a Bechstein with two keyboards, one of 16 made by the company; a Steinway B grand; an 1899 Blüthner; and an 1848 Pleyel, its original parts intact, that is identical to Chopin’s favorite piano. Of the piano in general, he said: “At times it’s your friend. At times it’s an all-consuming monster that’s about to devour you.”
Mr. Gerstein has thinning hair and an overbite that gives him a boyish air. He ponders the effect of recordings on listeners’ ears and finds freshness in sticking to the score and stripping away performing tradition (a word he does not like). “It can sound shockingly original if you just follow what’s written there,” he said. He also does not like the word career. “I prefer life in music,” he said.
Mr. Gerstein was born in Voronezh, in southern Russia, to a mathematician father and music-teaching mother. His parents, unusually for the time and place, had a large jazz collection that absorbed Mr. Gerstein. From the time of his earliest memory he studied musicianship and piano fitfully, until he became serious about the instrument at 10, at a specialized music school. At 11 he won a piano competition in Poland, where he encountered live jazz musicians for the first time. He later spent two summers there at a jazz seminar. “This was like a revolution,” he said.
At a jazz festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, Mr. Gerstein encountered Gary Burton, a vibraphonist and teacher at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, who eventually arranged for him to attend. At only 14, and without a high school diploma, Mr. Gerstein moved to Boston with his mother to study jazz at Berklee.
Soon, he said, he began to feel a little “overfed” with jazz and turned to classical music, partly influenced by an acquaintanceship with Ralph Gomberg, the former principal oboist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Looking back, Mr. Gerstein explained his conversion as the “radical position of a 16-year-old.” He said it seemed more interesting “to be busy with the great creations of the great minds” rather than with whatever he could produce as an improviser.
He dropped out of Berklee just shy of a degree and attended the Manhattan School of Music. His teacher there was Solomon Mikowsky. He also took lessons with Dmitri Bashkirov (in Madrid) and Ferenc Rados (in Budapest).
Mr. Gerstein came to public attention in 2001 with a first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. The next year he received a Gilmore Young Artist Award worth $25,000, becoming the first Gilmore Artist Award winner to have done so.
Mr. Gerstein has a busy concert schedule and plays with major European orchestras. He also collaborates in chamber groups with highly respected players like the cellists Steven Isserlis and Clemens Hagen, the violinist Joshua Bell, the flutist Emmanuel Pahud and the clarinetist Martin Frost. Reviews have generally glowed.
He has been teaching at the conservatory in Stuttgart since 2006, an unusual pursuit for a young pianist with a blossoming international career. But teaching, studying and performing are all part of the same endeavor, he said. “When I have to explain a piece to another person, I have a greater clarity of vision,” he said.
The official profile of a Gilmore Award winner is “a superb pianist and a profound musician” with charisma and broad musicianship who wants, and can keep up, a major international career. Candidates can be of any age or nationality; recent winners have been around 30. Countries of origin include Argentina, Poland, Norway, Finland and Britain.
The award was created in 1989 by the foundation established from the wealth of Irving S. Gilmore, whose family owned a department store in Kalamazoo and who was an heir to the Upjohn fortune. A modest and shy man who lived in a small apartment later in life, he was a serious amateur pianist and wanted to dedicate some of his money to helping musicians. The Gilmore Foundation, which has an endowment of $188 million, is the major provider of funds for the festival and the award.
The festival’s director chooses the evaluation committee, which this year consisted of Mr. Gustin himself; Matías Tarnopolsky, at the time the artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic; Sherman Van Solkema, a music professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Ann Schein, a concert pianist and teacher; Don Michael Randel, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Curtis Price, then the president of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
“They saw me in Toledo and Wichita and Birmingham, England,” Mr. Gerstein said. “You never know who is watching you where.”
Kirill Gerstein
Dear students and alumni,
For those of you who have the privilege of reading "The New York Times," you might have noticed that in the December 16 edition, page C4, the leading critic Anthony Tommasini selected two recordings of all the Liszt Transcendental etudes among his favorite releases for 2016, as performed by Daniil Trifonof on Deitsche Grammophon and Kirill Gerstein on Myrios Classis.
While asserting that Trifonof "dispatches them with exhilarating ease, imagination and brio", Mr. Tommasini expresses his preference for Kirill's interpretation, as it "best conveys the grandeur and musical madness of these pieces."
Bravo, Kirill! We look forward to your interpretation of the original version of the Tchaikovsky Concerto No.1 with the New York Philharmonic in February.
SM
Kirill Gerstein
Classical Music Listings for April 1-7
Kirill Gerstein (Wednesday) A brave program, this, from a noted pianist, reflecting on sonatas that are more like fantasias: both of Beethoven’s “Quasi una Fantasia” sonatas; two Liszt sonatas, the “Dante” and the B minor; and the New York premiere of Alexander Goehr’s “Variations (Homage to Haydn).” At 7:30 p.m., 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue; 212-415-5500, 92y.org. (David Allen)
Kirill Gerstein
Kirill Gerstein
SEMYON BYCHKOV AND KIRILL GERSTEIN
Hi, I will watch this live concert in the Berliner Philharmoniker's Digital Concert Hall:
Rarely has the Russian soul been captured in music so impressively as in Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – in its melancholy brooding, its singing and revolt. In this performance with Semyon Bychkov, pianist Kirill Gerstein debuts with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Peter Tchaikovsky fosters a completely different attitude in his Third Symphony, which is shaped by the festive cheer and dancing brilliance of his famous ballets.
Review: Kirill Gerstein Makes Sense of the Fantastical
At 14, the pianist Kirill Gerstein became the youngest student ever to enter the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied jazz. Now that two decades have passed, and he’s become one of the distinguished classical artists of his generation, it’s tempting to try to detect the influence of those early studies on his playing of the canon. The takeaway from his remarkable recital on Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y: It’s there, but not in any obvious ways.
Mr. Gerstein ended the first half of a daunting program with Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata, a 25-minute episodic, single-movement work that can come across as long-winded and overblown. Liszt subtitled the piece “After a Reading of Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata.” The music keeps shifting, from an opening section that depicts the screams of the condemned, burning in hell, to passages of dreamy melodic writing over shimmering chords, to stretches of contemplative chorales.
Mr. Gerstein’s background in jazz may have enhanced his ability to make sense of the fantastical qualities of the piece. He captured its moody swings, playing with uncanny delicacy in one episode and gnashing power the next. Yet from moment to moment, the music sounded purposeful, even when it took what seemed like a peremptory turn.
Mr. Gerstein’s program was organized around two genres: the sonata and the fantasy. Beethoven composed two sonatas subtitled “Sonata Quasi una Fantasia” (“Sonata Sort of Like a Fantasy”), and published them together as his Opus 27. Mr. Gerstein opened the concert with a crisp, vibrant performance of the seldom-heard first one, No. 13 in E flat; then he began the second half with the overplayed second, the “Moonlight” Sonata. In the way Beethoven toys with Classical structure and puts themes through bold development, the E flat Sonata is just as daring as the “Moonlight,” which was demonstrated powerfully in Mr. Gerstein’s bracing performance.
He also played a riveting piece written for him in 2012 by the British composer Alexander Goehr, “Variations (Homage to Haydn).” In this 10-minute work, modeled on Haydn’s Variations in F minor, Mr. Goehr combines neo-Classical motifs and gestures with Modernist styles and techniques. Mr. Gerstein played it with spontaneity and scintillating sound.
He ended with Liszt’s mighty Sonata in B minor, a piece even longer and harder than the “Dante” Sonata. It was a formidable, clear, detailed performance that conveyed the work’s impetuousness and structural radicalism.
Mr. Gerstein played no encores, which seemed right after presenting a program of such structural and thematic coherence and integrity.
For the past two decades, the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu has chosen not to record any music. He does not allow radio broadcasts of his playing, he does not give press interviews, and he has almost no social media presence. This had made his performances all the more prized. Lupu, who turns seventy on November 30, is far more than a great pianist; listening to him, my attention slips away from the beauty and mastery of his piano playing, deeply impressive though it is, with a rich palette of sound and resonance, control over chordal voicing fueled by an exceptionally refined harmonic sense, and a muscular apparatus that accurately plots into reality his imagination of the shape and timing of musical events. Soon, I find I am taken deep below and far above the surface. I think of the intimate occasion when Lupu played Schubert's Second Moment Musicaux as encore for about forty of us who wouldn't leave or stop applauding after his recital in Madrid's Auditorio Nacional. Because of the silences in the pauses, and the spaces between the decaying notes of the piano, the ears felt like they could taste the air.
As he plays, Lupu projects a state of deepest contemplation and responsiveness to the inner life of a musical composition. Motivic repetitions become perceptible as rhymes, the structurally important is differentiated from the ornamental, the stretching and contracting of musical time acquires an internal logic and a living, breathing musical structure emerges. The force of volume has little effect on these musical processes. Instead they become audible through Lupu's intense attentiveness to the piece. It appears to us organically rich in content, without any need of extraneous effects.
Ferruccio Busoni once wrote about the musical art: 'It is practically incorporeal. Its material is transparent. It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature itself.' Hearing Lupu conjure air into music in this way feels magical, and to be in the presence of an artist so engrossed is a most intimate, almost voyeuristic experience. Paradoxically, this sense of intimacy isn't diminished by the presence of many others in the concert hall, but made even greater through communal listening. Lupu's performance of the first nine measures of Schubert's final piano sonata is enough to give a sense of the way in which his playing embraces and envelops the entire concert hall in mystery and warmth.
Lupu's playing, especially when experienced live, resists my professional habit of analyzing the elements of interpretation and performance 'exactly how he achieves the results that he does. Trying to understand his phrasing, timing, or the effect his bear-like posture at the keyboard has on the sound yields only partial results. The whole is greater than the sum of its ingredients. The instrument, the craftsmanship, even the compositions themselves recede into the background, and there remains a lone figure communicating not just music, but something deeply humane. As Lupu plays, the experience of the composers, earlier encoded into sounds and preserved on paper, seems to be revived from the deep freeze of notation.
It is not often that an artist can accurately describe his musical ideals, and even less often that he lives up to them. In a rare interview from 1992, Lupu describes his expectations of musical performance: 'It is richness of experience and fantasy, and the ability to transport. The artist should have his own voice. Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value''
This was the impression I got from hearing Lupu play Brahms' First Piano Concerto in 2002. I won't forget that performance in Carnegie Hall, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim conducting. It wasn't just another excellent traversal of a well-known piece, a revisiting of familiar and beloved corners. Rather it gave the illusion of being composed there on the stage ' once again fresh, newly original, daring, but never eccentric or seeming as though Lupu had imposed himself on it. Here Lupu performs the same piece with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
While we await his future concerts, we can nourish our ears with the new Radu Lupu Complete Recordings, a compilation of his official studio recordings that Decca Classics released in November. Busoni called the recording process 'a devilish invention which lacks the demonic nuance.' Many have understood this to mean simply that the quality of sound captured by recordings lacked sufficient gradation. Yet I believe he also meant something more metaphysical, that while recordings capture instrumental sound, there is much else that doesn't get captured. Our senses create a multilayered impression of experiences. Could Lupu's absence from the recording studio be explained by an unwillingness to submit himself and his listeners to the reduction of experience necessitated by the smaller dimension of the recorded medium?
Yet even if Lupu's recordings can't replicate the experience of hearing him play live, they are still a treasure trove. With only a few exceptions, his studio discography, recorded between 1970 and 1996, is concentrated on central European repertoire of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. These recordings are considered to be an essential addition to the interpretive canon by pianists and listeners alike. He has played a wider range of repertoire in concert, including music by Bartok, Debussy and Janacek, as well as Liszt and Franck. Listeners wishing for more can scour YouTube and pianophile websites for numerous bootleg recordings from Lupu's concerts.
I find it uplifting simply to contemplate that, in an age when so many musicians feel compelled to spend much of their time engaged in social media and self-promotion, there exist such islands as Radu Lupu, who focuses entirely on his music, and is recognized for it.
Radu Lupu performs Schubert's third Moment Musicaux as an encore at La Scala, captured by a member of the audience, October 18, 2015.
Kirill Gerstein
St. Petersburg Philharmonic shows its velvet power at Carnegie
A fifteen-minute standard concert opener followed by a fifteen-minute contemporary symphonic meditation, with a piano concerto on the second half: that's a risky program. If the modern piece fails to win the audience, it leaves little meat above the break, and in either case it puts a good deal of pressure on the concerto soloist to deliver the sort of punch usually expected from a major symphonic work.
Brahms's First Piano Concerto, of course, is the sort of weighty concerto that can fill that role, and Kirill Gerstein has the artistic chops to realize the piece's potential. Gerstein still hasn't quite cracked the A-list of celebrity pianists, and it's hard to understand why. He combines musical intelligence and technical proficiency with playing that is boundlessly charismatic, even if his stage persona is rather unassuming.
On Thursday evening, performing with Susanna M'lkki and the New York Philharmonic, Gerstein demonstrated pianism of the highest order. He creates rich textures at the keyboard without sacrificing lyrical clarity, and varies his touch beautifully in the execution of a phrase. He showed singing grace in the opening Maestoso but was able to bring muscle when he needed it, matching the massive playing coming from M'lkki and the Philharmonic.
A noble, ruminative Adagio followed, breathing freely and perfectly paced. One extremely sour woodwind chord at the end left a bad impression, but Gerstein mitigated it by jumping into the Rondo before the moment had a chance to linger. Attacking the tricky passagework with a tempestuous spirit and guiding the whole movement with heroic virtuosity, Gerstein filled both the hall and the music with character. M'lkki's firm hand kept the Philharmonic tight, collaborating sensitively with Gerstein and even showing a little bite in the last movement.
Still, the second half of the concert belonged to Gerstein, and the top half, alas, gave M'lkki little opportunity to show her mettle in her much-anticipated Philharmonic debut (some have conjectured, her Philharmonic audition). The late Jonathan Harvey's 1998 Tranquil Abiding is music to daydream by. Its constant, gentle back-and-forth figure mimics the drawing and releasing of breath, introduced well below a pianissimo, and built so gradually that even when the piece reaches its loudest level, with blaring interjections of all kinds, a feeling of hypnotic calm persists. M'lkki controlled the arc perfectly, keeping the Philharmonic close the entire way.
Such was not the case in Brahms's 'St. Anthony' Variations (on the theme formerly attributed to Haydn). Right from the insufficiently lovely opening statement of the irresistibly lovely theme, the performance was flat. This is a playful piece, but on Thursday, sapped of the spark of imagination, it seemed deadly serious.
M'lkki's direction was no less clear in this music than elsewhere. She gives a wide beat, but her gestures are precisely regimented, so that her intentions are discernible even twenty rows into the audience.
Somehow, though, communication between her and the orchestra was lacking. Ensemble came unglued in the fifth variation, which was more scrambling than fluttering. When she broadened her stroke and asked for more sound, the Philharmonic responded with only the faintest hint of a crescendo. In the finale, about which there was little sense of finality, the players seemed wholly uninterested in M'lkki's brisker tempo.
Some of the most storied ensembles in the world are as renowned for their ornery dispositions as for their superb musicianship, and the New York Philharmonic certainly has not escaped that charge in the past. It would be a shame if that reputation reemerged just as the orchestra is trying to attract a new leader.
The program will be repeated 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall. nyphil.org.
Kirill Gerstein
Review: Susanna Malkki Makes an Immediate Impression
Though the Finnish conductor Susanna Malkki's long-overdue debut with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday night gave me deep pleasure, the occasion also stirred up some annoyance with the Philharmonic's leadership team. Where has this impressive 46-year-old artist been? How has it taken so long for the Philharmonic to invite her as a guest?
Accomplished, exuding quiet charisma, respected internationally for expertise in contemporary music and a wide swath of the standard repertory, Ms. Malkki could have been an exciting possibility to succeed Alan Gilbert, who has announced his departure, as music director in 2017. Alas, she is now bound for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, where she takes over in 2016. In any event, as Ms. Malkki said in a recent interview, it is only reasonable for the New York Philharmonic to appoint a music director who has worked regularly with the orchestra and established a relationship with players and audiences.
Ms. Malkki made a great start at doing both on Thursday at Avery Fisher Hall, even though on paper the program might not have seemed ideal for making an immediate impression. The second half was devoted to a probing, audacious performance of Brahms's teeming Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, with the extraordinary pianist Kirill Gerstein (taking the place of Jonathan Biss, who is nursing an injury). That Ms. Malkki collaborated so dynamically with Mr. Gerstein says much about her musicianship.
She had the first half to herself, beginning with an ebullient and imaginative account of Brahms's 'Variations on a Theme by Haydn.' That theme, a stately chorale (which many scholars assert was not actually composed by Haydn), sounded shapely and purposeful in the performance Ms. Malkki drew from the responsive players. But immediately in the first variation, she latched on to the investigative way Brahms explores this theme. Her inquisitive approach continued through the succession of variations: an elusive minor-mode one, a playful military march, a subdued variation rich with crawling counterpoint, and more, until the joyous finale.
Then Ms. Malkki led the Philharmonic's first performance of the British composer Jonathan Harvey's Buddhist-inspired 1998 piece, 'Tranquil Abiding,' a work co-commissioned by the Riverside Symphony, which gave the world premiere in New York in 1999. Ms. Malkki has long admired Mr. Harvey, who died in 2012 at 73.
Ms. Malkki developed her command of new music during a seven-year tenure as the music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, which she left in 2013. Mr. Harvey's mysterious 14-minute work is like an aural depiction of breathing and meditation. A slow-moving rhythmic gesture ' an inhalation poised on a high note that slides to an exhalation on a lower one ' runs through the piece. As the music breathes calmly, motifs and figures intrude: a burst of quiet brass, a darting riff in the woodwinds, fidgety melodic fragments. Sometimes these fleeting bits turn ominous and grating, like those thoughts that pop into your mind while meditating that, ideally, you are supposed to let go of. But in this case, the music is so interesting, and you almost want the intrusions to linger. Ms. Malkki could have picked a flashy contemporary piece, the better to wow an audience. Instead, she invited listeners into a mystical musical realm. The audience followed her, judging from the warm ovation.
In the Brahms concerto, all the dark, turbulent, Romantic fervor of the music came through. Yet, that Ms. Malkki and Mr. Gerstein play so much contemporary music (Mr. Gerstein, who made his Philharmonic debut in 2011, is also a jazz pianist) seemed crucial to their take on this youthful Brahms masterpiece. They were alert to every experimental turn and pungent harmonic twist. I have seldom noticed how obsessively Brahms relies on syncopated rhythmic writing in this score, even during pensive passages of the great slow movement.
Ms. Malkki's auspicious Philharmonic debut should be a reminder to the search committee, and to audiences, that beyond the usual suspects there are other potential conductors around.
Kirill Gerstein
ARTIST CHANGE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ARTIST CHANGE
April 29, 2015
Contact: Katherine E. Johnson
(212) 875-5718; johnsonk@nyphil.org
Pianist KIRILL GERSTEIN To Replace JONATHAN BISS in
BRAHMS's Piano Concerto No. 1
Conducted by SUSANNA MA'LKKI in Her Philharmonic Debut
Program Also To Include JONATHAN HARVEY's Tranquil Abiding and
BRAHMS's Variations on a Theme by Haydn
May 21'23, 2015
Pianist Kirill Gerstein will replace Jonathan Biss in the New York Philharmonic's performances
of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1, conducted by Susanna Ma'lkki in her New York
Philharmonic debut, Thursday, May 21, 2015, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, May 22 at 11:00 a.m.; and
Saturday, May 23 at 8:00 p.m. Due to an arm injury suffered in a recent accident, Mr. Biss is
unable to perform with the New York Philharmonic on the advice of his doctor. The program
will also include Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn and Harvey's Tranquil Abiding.
Kirill Gerstein made his Philharmonic debut in June 2011 performing Tchaikovsky's Piano
Concerto No. 1, led by Bramwell Tovey, as part of Summertime Classics; he repeated the
performance in July 2011 during the Philharmonic's Bravo! Vail residency. The New York Times
called the performance 'brilliant, perceptive and stunningly fresh ... Mr. Gerstein is emerging as
one of the most respected pianists of his generation.' He made his Philharmonic subscription
debut in October 2013 performing Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, led by
Semyon Bychkov.
Music Director Alan Gilbert will join Philharmonic musicians in chamber music on the Saturday
Matinee Concert, May 23 at 2:00 p.m. The afternoon's performance of Brahms's Piano Concerto
No. 1, conducted by Susanna Ma'lkki and with Kirill Gerstein as soloist, will be preceded by
Dvor'a'k's String Quintet in E-flat major with Alan Gilbert on viola alongside Philharmonic
Acting Concertmaster Sheryl Staples, Acting Principal Associate Concertmaster Michelle Kim,
Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps, and Principal Cello Carter Brey.
Pianist Kirill Gerstein ' considered to be one of today's most intriguing and versatile
musicians with his masterful technique, discerning intelligence, and a musical curiosity that has
led him to explore repertoire spanning centuries and numerous styles ' tours extensively as a
recitalist and concert soloist and often performs chamber music with his colleagues. Highlights
of his season included performances with the Boston, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Vancouver
symphony orchestras and the Minnesota and Philadelphia Orchestras, as well as a recital at
Carnegie's Zankel Hall. Performances abroad include the Vienna Philharmonic, London's
Philharmonia and BBC Symphony Orchestras, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Royal Scottish
National, and Sao Paulo Symphony orchestras. His discography for Myrios Classics includes the
world premiere recording of the 1879 version of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and
Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and two
recital releases that were named Best Recording of the Year by The New York Times: Imaginary
Pictures, pairing Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition with Schumann's Carnaval, and an
album of works by Schumann, Liszt, and Oliver Knussen. Mr. Gerstein received the 2010
Gilmore Artist Award and First Prize at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel
Aviv. Born in Russia, he studied classical piano at a special music school for gifted children
while teaching himself to play jazz by listening to his parents' extensive record collection. After
moving to the U.S. at the age of 14 he formally studied both genres ' first jazz piano at
Boston's Berklee College of Music, then classical piano at the Manhattan School of Music with
Solomon Mikowsky. Mr. Gerstein is currently artist-in-residence in the Piano Department at
Berklee College of Music and a member of the piano faculty at The Boston Conservatory, in the
first joint appointment between both institutions. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in
June 2011, when he performed Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, led by Bramwell Tovey; in
his most recent appearance with the Orchestra he performed Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a
Theme of Paganini, led by Semyon Bychkov, in October 2013.
Kirill Gerstein
Review: Kirill Gerstein Plays Liszt's 'Transcendental 'tudes'
Kirill Gerstein is evidently determined to prove his mettle as one of the great piano virtuosos of the day, and he made a strong case to be considered as such with his recital at Zankel Hall on Monday evening. In a fascinating program consisting of pedagogical forms run more or less amok, he ended with a dazzling performance of Liszt's 12 'Transcendental 'tudes,' some of the most difficult music ever written for piano.
No encores were demanded, and none offered. The audience seemed stunned, deliriously so.
Not that Mr. Gerstein comes out of nowhere. His impeccable credentials include first prize in the Arthur Rubinstein competition in Tel Aviv in 2001 and receipt of the Gilmore Artist Award in 2010. In addition, he has shown a wide-ranging musical curiosity and intelligence, his interests running to jazz as well as scholarly concerns.
Bartok's 'Mikrokosmos' consists of 153 studies in six volumes, graduated from simple eight-bar tunes in each hand to complex works a few pages long and laced with polyphony, chromaticism and tricky rhythms. Mr. Gerstein began with the 'Chromatic Invention' from Volume 6, essentially a slightly prickly sounding two-part invention in flowing style.
Then he continued, virtually without pause, into Bach's 15 Three-Part Inventions (BWV 787-801), making a seamless tapestry of the first half of the program. The readings throughout were lovely, with elegant lines and a warm touch.
But there are studies, and there are studies. From the start of the 'Transcendental 'tudes,' and especially the epic fourth 'tude, 'Mazeppa,' it was clear that Mr. Gerstein's technique would stand up to Liszt's most devilish challenges. The only real question was whether he had the physical and mental stamina to weather the full set of 12.
He did. There were a few smudges in 'Wilde Jagd' ('Wild Hunt'), but those and a missed note or two in the numbers that followed did nothing to detract from the overall impression of brilliance and command.
At least one listener, already an admirer, now views Mr. Gerstein with a new level of respect.
Kirill Gerstein
American Music Teacher August/September 2001:
Russian pianist Kirill Gerstein 1st Prize (Gold Medal) winner of the Arthur Rubinstein International Master competition in Tel-Aviv
March 6, 2010
Gerstein studied at MSM with Solomon Mikowsky, earning a Bachelor’s degree in 1999 and a Master’s in 2000. As winner of the School’s concerto competition in
1997, he performed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with
the Symphony under the baton
of Jerzy Semkow. He also appeared
as soloist with the Symphony in 2001, performing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in D Minor with Zden?ek Mácal conducting.
The award, which will officially be announced on Thursday morning, is music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants. And it is something of an anti-Van Cliburn Competition, a tacit rejection of the hoopla, bloodlust and horse-race quality of the international competition circuit. 
