Kirill Gerstein marked his place at the centre of the world of the piano with a concert in the City Recital Hall on June 17. The Berlin-based pianist, in Australia for several performances, played a program that mixed Viennese cafe society with the cutting edge of Australian composition, rightly resting on a bed of deserved laurels.
The City Recital Hall in Angel Place is spacious yet intimate; a setting suited to chamber music, especially Gerstein’s sympathetic tone. The evening began with Chopin’s ‘Polonaise in A-flat major’, played deftly and elegantly.
This was an excellent piece. Chopin always runs the risk of becoming blurred and watery, and despite its comparative length of 14 minutes, Gerstein kept playing it clearly and elegantly the whole way through. There is a wonderful weight and seriousness to this piece, and in the hands of a skilled player like Gerstein, its hills and plateaus — those moments of stunning, romantic beauty — are heartstopping.
In Brad Meldhau’s Apres Faure, one saw how Gerstein, feted as a pianist who straddles the bounds between jazz and classical, was in full effect. Meldhau’s writing was elegant and inventive,imbued with a wonderful feeling of his fondness for Faure but also his keen originality.
After this warm-up, Faure’s ‘13th Nocturne’ was an instance of restraint and quiet classical elegance like much of his piano work. As a composer often better suited to the orchestra, Faure’s piano work occasionally feels derivative of Chopin, but it was quite well chosen in light of this program. He was a composer with the capacity to produce in his music an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. Gerstein’s playing had the same effect.
After the interval, Chopin’s ‘Fantasie in F-minor’ — a 14 minute build-up of brightness — lulled us back into the hall, ending full of brio set up by moments of suitably Chopin-esque tenderness and pianissimo pondering.
Perhaps of most interest in the evening was the departure that arrived with the world premiere of Liza Lim’s ‘Transcendental Etude’. Lim hoped to capture a “tearing up” of time in this piece, and in the disparate, almost silent moments that Gerstein beautifully played, she achieved it. This was a profoundly avant-garde piece of music, and I must confess I found it challenging. Even so, it was so interesting to see the currents running through contemporary Australian art composition. One couldn’t have hoped for a better opportunity to discover new music; the skill of a talented composer mixed with the playing made for a wonderful opportunity to experience this piece for the first time in such an environment.
I never knew the old Vienna with its glamour and easy charm, but, in Gerstien’s playing of Robert Schumann’s ‘Faschingsschwank aus Wien’, I think I was whisked into it. Schumann is one of the finest piano composers of the Romantic period, and the inventiveness of the Carnival of Vienna — especially the lyrical joy of the third movement — and what Schumann himself called the “highly lively” staccato energy of the final movement, were wonderful. I felt like Charles Swann hearing the violin theme in Proust: here was a piece of music that conjured up in my mind images of fin-de-siecle Vienna, of coffee shops, the Prater, and waltzes in parquet ballrooms. It can be said with confidence that Kirill Gerstein is one of the finest interpreters of Schumann practicing today. One could compare this to Richter or Pletnev’s performances of this piece, but such comparison would place Gerstein in the unfair shadow of others; his skill allows him to stand alone as a virtuosic interpreter of the repertoire.
In the end, Gerstein’s playing and his excellently chosen program (everything seemed to complement everything else so well) made for an evening of well-rounded talent and beauty. The performance flowed like a river speckled with eddies but with a strong current of Gerstein’s skill and obvious love for the Romantic era. In mixing this with Meldhau and Lim’s recent works, he gave the audience a panoply of sound, a romp through both the canon and the cutting edge.
