Kirill Gerstein’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Kirill Gerstein (Russian: Кирилл Герштейн) (born 23 October 1979) is a Russian-American concert pianist. Born in the former Soviet Union, he became an American citizen in 2003 and is now based in Berlin. He is the sixth recipient of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award and currently Professor of Piano at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule in Berlin in addition to the Kronberg Academy’s Sir András Schiff Performance Programme for Young Artists. Between 2007-2017, he taught at the Stuttgart Musik Hochschule.

Early life and education

Gerstein was born in Voronezh in the former Soviet Union to a Russian Jewish family 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 taught himself jazz by listening to his parent’s 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 making him the youngest student ever admitted to the school.

Following his time at Berklee and second summer at Tanglewood, Gerstein decided to focus on classical music and moved to New York to attend 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. 2 with David Zinman and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and has since built a career as an international concert pianist.

Every year he appears world-wide in performances ranging from concerts with the Chicago and Boston Orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Royal Concertgebouw, Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, London Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, to recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall, Berlin’s Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus and New York’s Zankel Hall. He is a regular guest of festivals such as the Aspen Music Festival, the Blossom Festival with the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago’s Grant Park Music Festival, the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival, the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival.

In 2001, Kirill Gerstein won First Prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and the following year, 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. With the prize money, Gerstein has been able to commission new works from Timo Andres, Chick Corea, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen, and Brad Mehldau. The same year saw him also awarded the Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Kirill Gerstein records for the independent German label myrios classics and his releases have ranged from solo, chamber and concerto recordings. Featured releases include Busoni’s Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony and Sakari Oramo which won the Concerto Category at the 2020 International Classical Music Awards; “The Gershwin Moment” which saw him return to his jazz roots and collaborate with his mentor Gary Burton, Pink Martini’s Storm Large, and the St Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson; the world premiere recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in its original 1879 version with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin led by James Gaffigan; and Strauss’s Enoch Arden with the late Bruno Ganz as narrator.

Gerstein has also appeared on recordings by LAWO Classics as part of their Scriabin cycle with the Oslo Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko; Decca Classics for “The Tchaikovsky Project” boxset release by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic; and most recently Deutsche Grammophon who in February 2020 released the world premiere recording of Thomas Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra written especially by Adès for Gerstein. Taken from the world premiere concerts in Boston in March 2019 with the composer conducting, the new piece has now a tally of over fifty performances and has already been heard in New York, Leipzig, Copenhagen, Cleveland, London, Helsinki and Munich. Thomas Adès and Gerstein first worked together in 2007, and have since collaborated on many occasions as soloist and conductor as well as duet partners on the piano.

Discography