Piano maestro Kirill Gerstein makes a triumphant return after five-year wait

American pianist Kirill Gerstein’s tours are always eagerly awaited and his latest one more than most as it has been five years in the making.

Russian born American pianist Kirill Gerstein has made a long-awaited return here.

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American pianist Kirill Gerstein’s tours are always eagerly awaited by classical music fans, and his latest one, for Musica Viva Australia, generated more anticipation than ever as it has been five years in the making.

Delayed by lockdowns and post-pandemic travel chaos, 44-year-old Russian born Gerstein’s solo recital series shows us what we have been missing since he was last here in 2019 performing George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

His choices for this tour are eclectic to say the least, drawing on works by great composers for the piano as disparate as Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann alongside Gabriel Faure and Francis Poulenc, with a dip into his other love, jazz, and a world premiere of a piece by Australian composer Liza Lim.

But he is a skilful and thoughtful programmer, comparing the art to preparing a meal in which each dish complements the other. “The pieces throw a light on each other – or shadows. This makes us think about these connections in different ways,” he says.

It certainly worked for his one-off Sydney appearance, the recital earning him a standing ovation which he honoured with two superb encores in Sergei Rachmaninov’s irresistible arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid and Chopin’s Grand Valse nouvelle.

The program started in an almost improvisatory way with Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasia in which we imagine the composer sitting at the keyboard running through some chord sequences and letting the ideas flow until fragments of the polonaise’s distinctive rhythm percolate through.

There is a freedom to Gerstein’s playing that you don’t find in many concert pianists, perhaps because when young he was a jazzman, only fully concentrating on the classical repertoire later, despite taking a prize at the International Bach Competition in Poland when he was 11. Meeting the great jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton was cathartic and the 20-year-old went on to study jazz at Berklee and Manhattan.

As a late inclusion to the evening he played a piece by US jazz pianist and composer Brad Mehldau – a loving homage to Faure leading seamlessly into the Frenchman’s Nocturne No. 13. Gerstein dedicated both works to Sydney piano technician Ara Vartoukian, who tuned and prepared pianos for concerts and festivals around the world and who died recently.

Gerstein described him as a “magical person in a magical profession”.

The mood changed with Poulenc’s Three Intermezzi – sharp, bright, witty and haunting by turns – all played with peerless control of expression, dynamic and seamless technique.

Gerstein’s poetic sweep was given full rein in the works which closed the first half and opened the second – Liszt’s Polonaise in E major and Chopin’s Fantasie in F minor, both of which neatly linked back to the opening work of the night.

Lim’s new piece Transcendental Etude gave a nod to Liszt in its title – and there were some Lisztian flourishes in among the sudden pauses, syncopations and staccato chords. There was also a sense of anguish in the many textures of this eight-minute piece with its Middle Eastern-style harmonies. Lim refers to a ballad which in 2022 became the unofficial anthem of the freedom movement and protests led by women and girls in Iran.

Gerstein rounded off the concert with the vivid panoply of colours, moods and textures of Schumann’s Carnival of Vienna, written 17 years before he died in 1856 but never performed in his lifetime.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Kirill Gerstein

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN June 17, 2024