Kirill Gerstein

Kirill Gerstein, born in Voronezh in 1979, is a Russian-born American pianist. He studied classical piano at a special music school and taught himself jazz from his parents’ record collection. A meeting with the vibraphonist Gary Burton led to a place at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he arrived at fourteen as the youngest student the college had admitted. He then returned to classical music, studying with Solomon Mikowsky at the Manhattan School of Music, where he had taken both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees by the age of twenty, and later with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. He won first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv in 2001 and in 2010 became the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award, using the prize to commission new works from Timo Andres, Chick Corea, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen and Brad Mehldau. He taught in Stuttgart from 2007 to 2017 and since 2018 has been a professor at the Hanns Eisler academy in Berlin and at the Kronberg Academy.