Kirill Gerstein

Invited to Berklee at fourteen after Gary Burton heard him play jazz in St Petersburg, Gerstein had already been through a Russian special music school and would finish his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music in 1999 and 2000; he subsequently studied with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. Born in Voronezh in 1979 and now an American citizen, he won first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in 2001 and took both the Gilmore Artist Award and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2010. His repertoire includes Bach and the classical concerto at one end, Busoni, Gershwin and free improvisation at the other, and he has commissioned or given the first performances of works by Thomas Adès, Timo Andres, Chick Corea, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen and Brad Mehldau. His recording of the Adès concerto won a Gramophone Award in 2020. He is professor of piano at the Hanns Eisler school in Berlin and teaches at the Kronberg Academy. He gave the first performance of the Adès concerto with the Boston Symphony under the composer in 2019. Among his records are the complete Tchaikovsky concertos with Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic, including the composer's original version of the first, a Rachmaninoff anniversary album with the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko released in 2023, and Music in Time of War, pairing late Debussy with the Armenian priest and composer Komitas, which took a special Opus Klassik prize in 2025. The Manhattan School of Music gave him an honorary doctorate in 2021, and he also teaches at Verbier and IMS Prussia Cove.