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Kirill Gerstein

The Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein won several major awards in the U.S., where he was partly trained. He is a truly international figure, familiar as a pianist in several countries, and dividing his time between the U.S., where he became a citizen in 2003, and Germany, where he is a noted educator. Of Jewish background, Gerstein was born in Voronezh, in what was then the Soviet Union, on October 23, 1979. He started playing the piano at age three, and was influenced not only by classical piano teachers but the jazz from his parents' collection that he heard on the family record player. He took home his first prize, at the International Bach Competition in Poland when he was 11, but it was jazz that led him to a breakthrough: meeting jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton at a festival in St. Petersburg where Burton was performing, he was invited to study jazz on scholarship at Boston's Berklee College of Music. He moved on from Berklee to the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Solomon Mikowsky and earned both bachelor's and master's degrees before turning 20. Since then, his performing and recording activities have centered mostly on classical music, but he has remained interested in jazz, commissioning new works by pianists Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau, and becoming, in 2018, one of few pianists from the Russian sphere to perform Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Piano Concerto in F. Gerstein went on for private lessons in Budapest, Madrid, and Italy, and when he was ready to begin his concert career he found solo engagements in both North America (with the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among many other ensembles) and Europe (with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, and the London Philharmonic, to name just a few). He has appeared at the Blossom Music Festival in Cleveland and the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, among other major North American summer festivals. In prize competitions, he was unusually effective, winning the Gilmore Young Artist Award in 2002 and going on to win the Gilmore Artist Award at the biannual Gilmore Festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a prestigious honor that carried a $300,000 cash prize. Another major award was the Avery Fisher Career Grant, bestowed in 2010 by New York's Lincoln Center. Gerstein made his recording debut on Oehms Classics in 2004, but since then has recorded mostly for Germany's Myrios label, issuing a performance of Busoni's Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo in 2019. His performance of the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, won Germany's ECHO Klassik recording industry award. Gerstein lives and works in both the U.S. and in Germany, where he teaches piano at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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