‘I love chamber music and I never miss an opportunity to play it,” says 30-year-old Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival participant, pianist Kirill Gerstein.

“Through chamber music you find the right keys to a composer’s world and keep learning from your colleagues who don’t play your instrument and don’t care about your instrumental problems.”

Speaking via Skype from Shanghai, where he recently played Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto under Charles Dutoit, Gerstein continues, “For me, this festival is dearer than any other one, and no, I’m not saying that because I’m being interviewed for an Israeli newspaper,” he laughs.

“This was my first festival. It was where I heard and played many beautiful pieces for the first time. There I have befriended many musicians and where I always meet [artistic director] Elena Bashkirova and her father, Dmitry Bashkirov. It is almost a family event, which I have participated in since 2003.”

- Jerusalem Post, September 1, 2010

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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.

- PlaybillArts.com, June 29, 2010

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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.

- Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2010

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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.”

- New York Times, May 10, 2010

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Have you done that before, I ask, playing the same piece twice in one programme. ‘No, but I think sometimes people would like to hear something new again,’ he replies. ‘So I’ll try it.’

That brief exchange confirmed an observation I’d made during the interview we’d done the previous week: Gerstein is an intensely curious musician, eager to learn, willing to stumble, and happy to invite the audience along for the ride. On earning the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, for instance, he tells me that a stream of journalists have asked him how he feels about winning. ‘I’m continuing to digest it,’ he says. ‘But it occurred to me the other day that it will really be most interesting in three or four years, to see what’s happened.’

This sense of exploration, the cliché about the journey being more important than the destination, make Gerstein seem the perfect Gilmore winner. First, the Russian-born American started his musical life as a jazz performer, and emigrated to the US at 14 with his mother to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Although he’d always received classical training, it was only two years later that he decided to shift his entire focus to classical music.

As for the Gilmore, unlike most performance prizes the award goes to a musician who has no idea they’re being considered. Instead, it’s a cloak-and-dagger affair, with judges sneaking into multiple concerts, skulking behind programme notes. Even telling a pianist they’ve won is shrouded in mystery. According to the New York Times, Gerstein thought he was on his way to an interview with a Texan music critic. The critic turned out to be someone from the Irving S. Gilmore Keyboard Festival who administer the lucrative prize. That’s how he found out he’d won a prize he’d never bought a ticket for.
A Veteran of the Competition Circuit

Named after one Irving S. Gilmore of Kalamazoo, Michigan (pop 73,000) – an heir to the Upjohn pharmaceutical fortune whose family also owned a local department store – both the prize and festival are funded by the Gilmore Foundation from an endowment that runs close to $200-million, according to the Times.

The Gilmore prize is awarded every four years to ‘an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, has the potential to sustain a career as a major international concert artist.’ Past winners include Leif Ove Andsnes from Norway, the Argentine Ingrid Fliter and Ralf Gothoni from Finland.

Like most professional soloists of his calibre, Gerstein is a veteran of the competition circuit. Having earned first prize at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv and then picking up the Gilmore Young Artist Award a year later, he readily acknowledges the benefits of these big prestigious wins.

‘Winning a competition can be a great tool, it can really be very helpful’ in your career, says Gerstein. And there are other pluses. ‘[Competing] was a very good way of learning repertoire as a student, so I used competitions as an opportunity,’ he explains. ‘Part of the trick of surviving [them], of not being psychologically and musically devastated by them, is to find a way to feel experimental, to feel musical about them,’ he says.

Of course, words like ‘surviving’ and ‘devastated’ convey an implicit critique of the broader effects of ‘competition culture’ in the music world, which Gerstein expands.

‘When Menuhin and Oistrakh won prizes, they were one of two or three in the world. Now there are 300 competitions in Italy alone!’ he marvels. ‘I wonder with the amount spent on competitions, if it was taken and spent to organise concert series that would present young artists – well, I’m not sure the result is much worse. It’s not necessarily a concert life they’re trying to stimulate,’ he concludes.
An Ideal Winner

Perhaps this disposition is why Gerstein found the Gilmore process so fascinating, and in turn became its ideal winner. ‘It’s a very honest and transparent process in the sense that you’re only trying to be who you are in a concert’, says Gerstein.

‘They capture the pianist in a natural light and in their natural habitat, so they can judge their development over time…or lack thereof!’ he says with a chuckle. ‘The fact that it’s careful, long-term observation is a very different thing, it leads to different results.’

Is there a common thread amongst the winners, I ask. ‘I think the similarity is that they have taken people who have been very different from each other, but also very different from what are considered “mainstream’ expectations”‘ says Gerstein. ‘They all have wide-ranging interests.’

Gerstein says he thinks he’ll use some of the Gilmore prize money to explore his own wide-ranging interests, which run across art forms. ‘Classical music continues to be a living, valid source of inspiration and activity, not in a vacuum all by itself,’ says Gerstein.

‘It’s much more healthy being busy with pieces rather than being busy with performers, and placing music in a more social and alive kind of context,’ he says. ‘Who I become as a performer doesn’t interest me that much.’

Kirill Gerstein premieres Oliver Knussen’s ‘Ophelia’s Dream’ at a Gilmore Festival recital on 3 May, and performs at a Gala Concert on 8 May.

~ by Juliana Farha / Dilettante

…the resourceful Kirill Gerstein showed…how to turn the tried-and-true piano recital into something startingly fresh …. Mr. Gerstein played with aplomb…with valiant determination and great effect…

The New York Times
Anthony Tommasini,
23. January 2007