Kirill Gerstein

The American pianist Kirill Gerstein, who was born in 1979 in Voronezh, Russia, and now lives in Berlin, came to classical music via jazz: he initially began studying both disciplines at the age of 14 at Berklee College in Boston but decided, two years later, to focus on classical music and continued his training with Solomon Mikovsky in New York, Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid, and Fe-renc Rados in Budapest. Gerstein won the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv in 2001, the Gilmore Young Artist Award in 2002, and the Avery Fisher Grant Award in 2010. He went on to perform with leading American orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestras and the New York Philharmonic. He now tours around the world giving solo recital programs and appearing as a soloist in orchestral concerts. In the 2021-22 season, he performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Alan Gilbert. He has played Mozart with
the Camerata Salzburg and Andrew Manze, the Schumann Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Karina Canellakis, the Schoenberg Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and François-Xavier Roth, Ravel’s piano concertos with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and the two Brahms Concertos with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. He has given recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Liszt Academy in Budapest and has made guest appearances with the Hagen Quartet at the Cologne Philharmonie. He enjoys a close association with Thomas Adès, who composed his Piano Concerto for Gerstein, through their longstanding piano duo collaboration. Gerstein has recorded the Concerto and other piano compositions by Adès, winning the Gramophone Award in 2020 and the International Classical Music Award in 2021, among others. Kirill Gerstein, who holds an honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music, is a professor of piano at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and at the Kronberg Academy.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 1 September 2005 playing works by Schubert, Rachmaninoff, and Kreisler.

July 2022