Pianist Kirill Gerstein joins 21C Media Group’s roster
21C Media Group is proud to announce that it now represents pianist Kirill Gerstein, handling his media and public relations. One of today’s most intriguing young musicians, in January 2010 Gerstein was named the sixth recipient of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award – “music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grants,” according to the New York Times – made every four years to a pianist of exceptional ability and profound musicianship, deemed capable of sustaining a prominent international career. As the Boston Globe affirms, the Russian-born pianist is “on the fast track to a major career, and he deserves to be.”
Highlights of Kirill Gerstein’s 2009-10 North American season have included debuts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, and with the Atlanta Symphony and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; re-engagements with the Detroit, Houston, and Oregon Symphonies; a tour with cellist Steven Isserlis that included performances in San Francisco and at the Kennedy Center; and Gerstein’s upcoming Gilmore Artist recital and concerto appearances at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in May. Internationally, Gerstein appeared with the NHK Symphony Orchestra and Dutoit in Tokyo, tours Switzerland with the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia, and performs with Hanover’s NDR Orchestra in Austria and Italy. In July Gerstein will make his Boston Symphony debut at Tanglewood. He has previously appeared at the Verbier, Aix-en-Provence, Jerusalem, and Lucerne Festivals, with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Saratoga, and in Caracas with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolívar Youth Orchestra.
The Chicago Tribune reviewed Gerstein’s Chicago Symphony debut earlier this month. About his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, critic John von Rhein wrote, “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.”
Gerstein has worked with such eminent European orchestras as the Munich, Rotterdam, and Royal Philharmonics, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Zurich’s Tonhalle, the Finnish and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras, WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has also appeared in recital in Paris, Prague, Hamburg, London’s Wigmore and Queen Elizabeth Halls, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest. He made his Salzburg Festival debut playing solo and two-piano works with András Schiff in 2008.
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. He became an American citizen in 2003 and is currently a professor of piano at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart.
Kirill Gerstein’s upcoming engagements:
(North American dates shown in bold)
March 26, 2010
Warsaw, Poland
Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin / Ingo Metzmacher
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2
March 28, 2010
Hamburg, Germany
Recital with Tabea Zimmermann, viola
Brahms; Schumann; Stravinsky; Shostakovich
April 8 & 10, 2010
Rochester, NY (debut)
Rochester Philharmonic / James Gaffigan
Bernstein: Symphony No. 2 for Piano & Orchestra (The Age of Anxiety)
April 15-18, 2010
Lustenau, Austria (April 15); Salzburg, Austria (April 16); Copenhagen, Denmark (April 18)
Recital tour with Clemens Hagen, cello
Debussy; Janácek; Dvorák; Beethoven; Brahms
April 24-30, 2010
Switzerland: St. Gallen (April 24); Zurich (April 26); Bern (April 27); Visp (April 29); Geneva (April 30)
Tour with State Academic Symphony Orchestra / Mark Gorenstein
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1
May 3 & 5, 2010
Kalamazoo, MI
Gilmore International Keyboard Festival
2010 Gilmore Artist solo recital and master class
May 8, 2010
Kalamazoo, MI
Gilmore International Keyboard Festival Gala Concert
Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra / Raymond Harvey
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1; Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (original band version)
May 18 & 19, 2010
Innsbruck, Austria (May 18); Vienna, Austria (May 19)
Tour with NDR Radio Symphony Hannover / Eivind Gullberg Jensen
Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3
July 30, 2010
Lenox, MA
Tanglewood Music Festival (debut)
Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Dutoit
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1
August 6, 2010
Saratoga, NY
Saratoga Performing Arts Center
Philadelphia Orchestra
Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major
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© 21C Media Group, March 2010