Kirill Gerstein

Early life and education

Gerstein was born in Voronezh in the Soviet Union and began playing the piano at age three. At the age of 11, he won his first competition—the International Bach Competition in Gorzów, Poland. Though he studied classical piano formally, he also learned to play jazz by listening to his parents’ record collection. At the age of 14, he met jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton at a festival in St. Petersburg, which led to a full-scholarship offer to study jazz piano at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Gerstein was the youngest student ever admitted to the school.

Following his time at Berklee and second summer at Tanglewood, Gerstein attended the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Solomon Mikowsky, earning both his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees by the age of 20. He continued his studies in Madrid with Dmitri Bashkirov at Queen Sofía College of Music, in Budapest with Ferenc Rados, and also at the International Piano Academy Lake Como.

Career

Kirill Gerstein made his major orchestral debut in September 2000 performing Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 with David Zinman and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and has since built a career as a major international concert artist.

As a soloist, Gerstein has performed with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, and the Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Montreal, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Toronto Symphonies, among other North American orchestras. Abroad, he has performed with such orchestras as the Berlin, Czech, Munich, Rotterdam, and London Philharmonics, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, and the Zürich Tonhalle, as well as with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra.

Gerstein’s festival appearances include engagements with the Aspen Music Festival, Blossom Festival with the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and—with the Philadelphia Orchestra—Bravo! Vail, Mann Music Center, and Saratoga Chamber Music Festival. He debuted at the Salzburg Festival playing solo repertoire and piano-duo works with András Schiff. He has also performed at the Lucerne Festival, Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, and the BBC Proms.

Early honors and awards include First Prize at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and the 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award.

In January 2010, Gerstein was announced as the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award, which recognizes “extraordinary piano artistry” once every four years with a $300,000 prize. Previous winners include Leif Ove Andsnes from Norway, Piotr Anderszewski from Poland, and Ingrid Fliter from Argentina. With the prize money, Gerstein has been able to commission new works from Timo Andres, Chick Corea, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen, and Brad Mehldau, with additional commissions scheduled for future performance.

In April 2010, Gerstein was awarded Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant.

In 2015, Gerstein’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin led by James Gaffigan, was honored with an ECHO Klassik Award as the “Concerto Recording of the Year.” This recording marked the world premiere of the Tchaikovsky concerto in its 1879 urtext edition, which reflects the way the composer himself conducted the concerto before a series of posthumous edits were made to the score. Based on Tchaikovsky’s own conducting score from his last public concert, the new critical edition was published in 2015 by the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin, tying in with Tchaikovsky’s 175th anniversary and marking 140 years since the concerto’s world premiere in Boston, in 1875. For the recording, Kirill was granted special pre-publication access to the new edition.

On September 9, 2016, myrios classics releases Gerstein’s recording of Liszt’s complete Transcendental Etudes.

Selected discography

Though Gerstein now records for myrios classics, his 2004 debut recital recording of works by Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin (arranged by Earl Wild), and Scriabin was released on Oehms Classics.

Awards