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April 13, 2012
A profound versatility
Kirill Gerstein is at the Chan on April 19.
DANA SCHLANGER
He’s young, but there are many young concert pianists. He can play anything in the repertoire, but there are many young pianists who are versatile. He’s on Facebook and Twitter, but so is everyone else nowadays. What sets Kirill Gerstein apart is that he has all of this plus an usual breadth of inspiration and curiosity, including a significant jazz repertoire on par with his classical music prowess, and he possesses a thoughtful yet unassuming manner in which he juggles a formidable international career. Vancouver audiences will have the opportunity to get a sense of Gerstein’s musicianship on April 19, when he performs for the Vancouver Recital Society at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.
In 2010, Gerstein received the Gilmore Artist Award. The prize is bestowed every four years on an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses broad and profound musicianship and charisma, and can sustain a career as a major international concert artist. The Jewish Independent caught up with Gerstein in Germany, where he spoke about receiving the award:
“The Gilmore has only been awarded five times before and it’s wonderful because it is not a piano competition in any traditional sense. The committee is secret and it’s not even announced that anyone is under consideration until the recipient is actually notified. The jurors covertly go to many concerts over a period of two to three years without the pianist even knowing it,” he explained. “I think that this very careful and intensive process of selection assures that there is much less an element of gamble than in a regular piano competition, where you hear someone for two weeks at one point in their life, in a certain year, and it’s done. It also comes with a huge monetary award, $300,000, which is to be used for musical purposes ... not for parties! This welcomes the question what to do with this kind of money.”
The award has enabled Gerstein to commission new piano music from composers that he admires. “This is one of the big things I’ve been using the money for, because I felt it was good to redistribute the award amongst fellow artists. It’s wonderful to offer the opportunity to create pieces that I get to première, but they remain in the repertoire afterwards for any interested pianist to play them, forever. It also gives me a chance to interact with living composers that I greatly respect. This is the case of Oliver Knussen’s Ophelia’s Last Dance, which I commissioned on very short notice for the Gilmore Award festival in 2010 and will also be playing in the Vancouver recital.”
Gerstein said he loves to build programs around a central idea and for Vancouver he has created “a program that is all related to dance. The way I see it, dance is, in a very primitive way, half of music’s origin, the other half being song. It’s terribly over-simplified, but the idea was to show how dance figures in piano music. The start of the program is Bach’s English Suites, which is a collection of Baroque dances. The second piece is a Mozart gigue, arranged by
Ferruccio Busoni, the great Italian pianist and composer, who juxtaposes what is, more or less, the original Mozart gigue with a section that is the fandango from a Mozart opera. And then comes Ophelia’s Last Dance, a very melancholic dance, but nevertheless a dance. The first half ends with Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, which is perhaps the first example of a concert waltz, and a very beautiful piece. The second part starts with Liszt’s transcriptions of many Schubert waltz-like compositions, grouped under the name Soirée de Vienne, followed by Schumann’s Carnaval, which is all pervaded by the spirit of dance and evokes the image of carnival celebrations and playful deceit.”
It’s an unorthodox program, but this is the way Gerstein puts his stamp on everything he does. It seems he’s being doing things this way ever since his childhood in Soviet Russia, when he was studying classical music but taught himself jazz piano by listening to his parents’ jazz record collection.
“Jazz became my main focus,” he said, “and I went to America at 14 to study at Berklee College of Music, which is basically a jazz school. For awhile, I was still going back and forth between the two styles, but realized at some stage that I need to make a choice, which I basically did when I was 16, and chose classical. But I never stopped playing both genres of music and I am interested in investigating, and then blurring, the borders between these styles, as well as highlighting the similarities. I’ve also commissioned two new jazz works, by Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau, with my Gilmore Award money, and premièred them in an exceptional evening on March 30 at Berklee.”
One of the main turning points in Gerstein’s career was winning the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv in 2001. “It was very important to me,” he said of the experience. “It was confirmation that I was doing the right thing. It was also good because I didn’t feel the need to go to more competitions, but instead could just start playing many concerts and recitals, which attracted me so much more. It was also my first time in Israel, which was quite moving. I grew up with a strong secular Jewish identity. [I] did not grow up religiously, because that was just not possible in Soviet Russia at the time, but I did have a strong sense of being Jewish and definitely not being recognized as Russian.”
Going to Israel within the context of the Rubinstein competition enhanced the emotional experience, he said. “It was very special to go to the place that I had heard so much about. I was ready to be a skeptic, but was surprised to find it a very moving place. I experienced a very strong connection but, of course, the fact that I won the competition also helped! I’ve been to Israel many, many times since, for various performances and I’m always going back with great joy.”
For tickets to Gerstein’s April 19, 8 p.m., performance, call 604-602-0363 or visit vanrecital.com.
Dana Schlanger is a freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts.
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