Catch Kirill Gerstein in Three Thrilling Performances This Season!
Kirill Gerstein, one of the most lauded and in-demand pianists in the world, arrives in Santa Fe this week and stays through the end of the Festival’s 51st season to give thrilling performances on August 12, 13, and 19.
Audiences have been packing Gerstein’s Santa Fe performances since 2012, when he made his Festival debut playing works by Schumann and Gershwin as well as a piece he commissioned (with some of his 2010 Gilmore Artist Award prize money) from the acclaimed American jazz composer and pianist Brad Mehldau.
Gerstein’s stylistic range, coupled with his emotional depth and technical mastery, has earned him not just loyal audiences around the world but also titles, positions of honor, and awards as well—from being named artist-in-residence for London’s Wigmore Hall, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence to winning an Avery Fisher Career Grant and first prize at the 10th Arthur Rubinstein Competition. This season, to name just a few highlights, Gerstein serves as a Spotlight Artist for the London Symphony Orchestra; gives recitals at Carnegie Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and the Abu Dhabi Festival; and appears as a soloist with many of the world’s leading ensembles, including—among several others—the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; Orchestre National de France; Boston Symphony Orchestra; Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala; Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich; Minnesota Orchestra; and Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and Munich philharmonic orchestras. In April, Gerstein released his latest album, Music in Time of War: Debussy/Komitas.
Gerstein was born in the former Soviet Union, and from an early age he loved and studied both classical music and jazz. At age 14, he became the youngest student to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and at 16, he made the decision to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music to focus on classical music. In an interview with the London Symphony Orchestra, Gerstein said: “I’ve always been interested [in exploring] this border between jazz and classical and have always felt that the border is much more porous than strong and impenetrable.”
The music Gerstein performs at the Festival this summer is anything but impenetrable. On August 12, he appears as part of an all-star ensemble in Brahms’s “beautiful beyond words” Piano Quintet (to quote one of Brahms’s contemporaries), and the following day, on August 13, he gives a rich Romantic recital featuring works by Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. On August 19, he helps bring the Festival’s season to a spectacular close with Janáček’s lyrical Violin Sonata—played alongside the stunning violinist John Storgårds—and then, as part of an exciting assortment of Festival favorites, he and the Dover Quartet share the stage for the first time in a powerhouse performance of Dvořák’s rousing Piano Quintet, Op. 81.
Tickets for all three of Gerstein’s performances are going fast. Contact our Ticket Office today at 505-982-1890, or get your tickets online here.