Former Mikowsky student wins
Gilmore and Avery Fisher Artist Awards
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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.”
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.
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.
Music Review
A Pianist Fills in, Saving the Day
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: May 10, 2010
The Peoples’ Symphony Concerts series was to have closed its season on Sunday afternoon with a recital at Town Hall by Ingrid Fliter, the Argentine pianist who won the Gilmore Artist Award in 2006. But when Ms. Fliter, down with the flu, bowed out of the engagement on Saturday evening, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., offered a substitute: Kirill Gerstein, this year’s winner of the $300,000 quadrennial prize, who was in Kalamazoo to perform at the festival, and planned to fly to Europe on Sunday. With a slight juggling of his travel plans, Mr. Gerstein, a naturalized American who was born in Russia, performed instead of Ms. Fliter.
Each half of Mr. Gerstein’s fascinatingly constructed program began with a Busoni sonatina, followed by Oliver Knussen’s “Ophelia’s Last Dance” (Op. 32) — that’s right, he played it twice — and then a large Romantic work. The Knussen piece was written for Mr. Gerstein, who gave its premiere at the Gilmore festival on May 3, and he said he felt it deserved to have an immediate second hearing. Given its six-minute length, that was hardly too much to ask.
As it turned out, though “Ophelia’s Last Dance” has its angular turns, it is unusually easygoing by Mr. Knussen’s standards. It begins with a dash of light-textured sparkle and a gently chromatic line, and as it grows more emotionally charged, its language veers toward neo-Romanticism rather than the harmonic density of Mr. Knussen’s earlier music. It also offers an easily recognizable signpost: a short melodic figure that crops up periodically, like the ritornello of a Baroque or Classical rondo.
Busoni’s two works are, in effect, glorified pastiches. In the Sonatina Brevis No. 5, “In Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni,” quotations from Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in D minor (BWV 905) mingle with unalloyed Busoni. And the Sonatina No. 6 is a fantasy on themes from “Carmen,” filtered through Busoni’s mildly acidic harmonic sensibility and spun together by the light of his quirkily humorous imagination.
Mr. Gerstein played these pieces with an illuminating clarity and an unassailable technique. Those qualities served him even better on larger canvases. In Schumann’s “Humoreske” (Op. 20), Mr. Gerstein kept the singing top line soaring over the accompaniment, even in the work’s more intensely driven sections, and if that was not quite enough to conquer the structural unwieldiness that afflicts the work, the reading maintained a level of excitement that overcame the score’s shortcomings.
But this performance paled beside Mr. Gerstein’s spellbinding account of Liszt’s B minor Sonata, in which he balanced a big, torrential sound in the work’s thunderous sections with crystalline — but still assertive — phrasing in the more introspective passages. As an encore, he gave a brisk, pedal-free performance of the two bourées from Bach’s English Suite No. 2.
MUSIC REVIEW
A Fresh Take Adds a Jolt to a Standard
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
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.
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.”
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, 2010Dmitri 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.
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.
Music Review
A Pianist Fills in, Saving the Day
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: May 10, 2010
The Peoples’ Symphony Concerts series was to have closed its season on Sunday afternoon with a recital at Town Hall by Ingrid Fliter, the Argentine pianist who won the Gilmore Artist Award in 2006. But when Ms. Fliter, down with the flu, bowed out of the engagement on Saturday evening, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., offered a substitute: Kirill Gerstein, this year’s winner of the $300,000 quadrennial prize, who was in Kalamazoo to perform at the festival, and planned to fly to Europe on Sunday. With a slight juggling of his travel plans, Mr. Gerstein, a naturalized American who was born in Russia, performed instead of Ms. Fliter.
Each half of Mr. Gerstein’s fascinatingly constructed program began with a Busoni sonatina, followed by Oliver Knussen’s “Ophelia’s Last Dance” (Op. 32) — that’s right, he played it twice — and then a large Romantic work. The Knussen piece was written for Mr. Gerstein, who gave its premiere at the Gilmore festival on May 3, and he said he felt it deserved to have an immediate second hearing. Given its six-minute length, that was hardly too much to ask.
As it turned out, though “Ophelia’s Last Dance” has its angular turns, it is unusually easygoing by Mr. Knussen’s standards. It begins with a dash of light-textured sparkle and a gently chromatic line, and as it grows more emotionally charged, its language veers toward neo-Romanticism rather than the harmonic density of Mr. Knussen’s earlier music. It also offers an easily recognizable signpost: a short melodic figure that crops up periodically, like the ritornello of a Baroque or Classical rondo.
Busoni’s two works are, in effect, glorified pastiches. In the Sonatina Brevis No. 5, “In Signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni,” quotations from Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in D minor (BWV 905) mingle with unalloyed Busoni. And the Sonatina No. 6 is a fantasy on themes from “Carmen,” filtered through Busoni’s mildly acidic harmonic sensibility and spun together by the light of his quirkily humorous imagination.
Mr. Gerstein played these pieces with an illuminating clarity and an unassailable technique. Those qualities served him even better on larger canvases. In Schumann’s “Humoreske” (Op. 20), Mr. Gerstein kept the singing top line soaring over the accompaniment, even in the work’s more intensely driven sections, and if that was not quite enough to conquer the structural unwieldiness that afflicts the work, the reading maintained a level of excitement that overcame the score’s shortcomings.
But this performance paled beside Mr. Gerstein’s spellbinding account of Liszt’s B minor Sonata, in which he balanced a big, torrential sound in the work’s thunderous sections with crystalline — but still assertive — phrasing in the more introspective passages. As an encore, he gave a brisk, pedal-free performance of the two bourées from Bach’s English Suite No. 2.
MUSIC REVIEW
A Fresh Take Adds a Jolt to a Standard
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
ARTS & LEISURE
Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen (excerpt)
BY ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Kirill Gerstein.
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IPF Email: interpianofest@hotmail.com
© 2003-2011 International Piano Festivals
All rights reserved.