On the evening of May 5, in Munich’s Hercules Hall, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Italian conductor Antonello Manacorda planned to surprise the audience with a program that included two symphonies by Franz Schubert – the Third Symphony in Remajor, the score of which the composer wrote the first notes at the age of 18 in the beautiful 1815 in May, as well as the Sixth Symphony in Domažor, which was composed only a couple of years later and is called the “Little Domažor Symphony” due to its basic tonality. Accordingly, the honor of the “Great Domažor Symphony” goes to Schubert’s Ninth.

But it was even more impressive to hear two piano concertos by Maurice Ravel in one evening with an interval between them, and this is the idea of ​​Kiril Gerstein, soloist in residence of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra last season. It is true that Maurice Ravel also composed both scores almost at the same time – the Solmajor Concerto and the Left Hand Concerto in Remajor – it was in the 20s-30s of the last century. years passed, and among other things, the sound language was provided by both the influence of jazz music and real historical events – The concert for the left hand was commissioned by the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right hand during the First World War.

Kirill Gerstein was born in 1979 in the Russian city of Voronezh, lives in Berlin, is a professor of the piano department at the Berlin Hans Eisler University of Music and teaches piano at the Kronberg Academy. At the age of 14, Kirill Gershtein went to study jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and continued his studies with Solomon Mikovsky in New York, Dmitriy Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Radoš in Budapest. In 2001, he won the first place in the Artur Rubinstein competition in Tel Aviv, in 2002 – the Gilmore Young Musician Award, in 2010 – the Avery Fisher Scholarship and the Gilmore Award.