Reviews
Second concert is a first
By Andrew L. Pincus, Special to The Eagle
Updated: 07/30/2010 01:54:53 PM EDT
Friday July 30, 2010
LENOX - Kirill Gerstein plays classical and jazz piano, loves food and cooking, enjoys books and is addicted to electronic gadgets, travels and teaches - and has $300,000 in prize money he can't decide what to do with.
He's also scoring a Berkshire first. He'll be at Tanglewood tonightas the soloist in a biggie piano concerto and at Tannery Pond Concerts tomorrow for a solo recital.
Gerstein, 30, arrives as the 2010 winner of the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award. The two Berkshire programs show two of the many sides of this Russian ˆ©migrˆ©, now a naturalized American citizen.
With the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, he'll play Tchaikovsky's No. 1, probably the most popular piano concerto of them all.
At Tannery Pond, in New Lebanon, N.Y., he'll give a more cerebral program of Bach, Chopin and Schumann, commemorating the Chopin- Schumann bicentennial year.
"I think the popular and the cerebral can live together, and I try not to be pitched in either one of the categories," he says. He speaks slowly, choosing his words with care.
Nor does he worry about following in the footsteps of the pianists - many famous - who have played and recorded the Tchaikovsky warhorse before him. "We all play somewhat differently," he says. "Especially if one is honest and doesn't try to directly imitate anyone, one can learn from other performers, obviously. Somehow I don't have terrible anxiety about the fact that the piece is often played or somebody else played it."
The text, he explains, "has its very clear demands, and also its very nebulous ambiguities. From that on, interpretation generates itself."
Tanglewood and Tannery Pond are important milestones in the pianist's career. It was three summers at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in the 1990s that helped to turn him away from jazz and into a classical career. This will be his third appearance at Tannery Pond, where he is a favorite of director Christian Steiner.
The twin BSO and Tannery offers came before Gerstein won the Gilmore. Steiner, who had discovered Gerstein while shooting publicity photos of him as he played at the keyboard, piggybacked onto the Tanglewood date.
"Kindly enough," Gerstein said by phone before beginning the Berkshire trek, neither the BSO nor Steiner objected to the double dip.
The storybook Gilmore discovery happened like this: The Kalamazoo, Mich.- based competition and festival chooses its winners by sending scouts around the world to listen to pianists anonymously. During a concert tour last November, Gerstein was told in Jacksonville, Fla., that a music critic from Houston had come to interview him. The pianist thought it was strange but O.K., that's life.
There was no critic. At the hotel bar, former Tanglewood manager Daniel Gustin, now the Gilmore director, was waiting. He was the bearer of news: the surprise award.
Not that Gerstein was unknown in Kalamazoo. In 2002, he had received a two- year Gilmore Young Artist Award. He is the first Gilmore young artist to graduate to the big award, which is given every four years, and sixth in line of succession, following the Argentine Ingrid Fliter. As a follow- up, in April he won a $25,000 Avery Fisher career grant.
Gerstein was born and began piano studies in Voronezh, Russia. Further studies followed in Poland, New York, Madrid, Budapest and - significantly - the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where he went from Poland to study jazz, and thence to the B.U. institute.
It was while at Berklee in the early 1990s that Gerstein met the late Ralph Gomberg, then the BSO's principal oboist, through a relative of Gomberg's wife, Sydelle.
Gomberg was the first classical musician the young ˆ©migrˆ© knew in the United States. Though he remembers Gomberg's initial reaction as " another -----Russian," Gomberg introduced him to Tanglewood and induced him to apply to the B.U. branch, which is for high school-aged students.
"He probably thought he was rescuing me from the jazz by at least giving me a shot of classical education during the summers," Gerstein recalled. "It fit right into my feeling at the time, that I had very intensively explored my jazz studies and felt that I was missing doing more classical music."
Gerstein describes those two summers, 1994 and 1995, as a "wonderfully enriching time" during which he served as Gomberg's accompanist for oboe lessons. He returned the following summer as a staff accompanist, again for Gomberg, who became a mentor. Remembering those sessions, he says with a laugh, "I can fake oboe lessons."
Gerstein still plays jazz as a hobby but may return to it professionally. He feels it "somewhere inside of me, still moving around."
With a girlfriend who tours with him, Gerstein is based in New York City and Stuttgart, Germany, where he has taught at the conservatory since 2006. His parents live in Boston.
Meanwhile, there's the decision of how to spend the $300,000. With five pianos already to his name, he's trying to resist the temptation to buy another.
He sees one he likes and thinks: "I've got to rescue this pet. It's standing so sadly in this dressing room and it could be so beautiful."
Definitely, he says, he'll use some of the money to commission new pieces, which would benefit him and be "something for the greater good." He's already savoring a piece commissioned for him as part of his award, "Ophelia's Last Dance," by former Tanglewood composer and teacher Oliver Knussen.
It isn't on the printed program but he'll play the piece at Tannery Pond anyway. It'll be a surprise from the winner of the surprise award.