Czech Philharmonic • Alan Gilbert

Born in the territory of the former Soviet Union, the pianist Kirill Gerstein studied in the USA, Spain, and Hungary, and at present he lives in Berlin. Today an American citizen, he represents something like an intersection of the interpretive traditions that he absorbed while maturing as a pianist, taking inspiration from them to create a musical language of his own. Besides his geographical mobility, he also moves freely between historical periods: his repertoire includes works of the traditional canon and contemporary music. He also grew up with jazz.

It was jazz that took him to the Berklee College of Music as the youngest student in the school’s history at 14 years of age. Acting as an intermediary was the jazz legend Gary Burton, whom Gerstein had met in Saint Petersburg. In Boston, he studied jazz and classical piano for several years before deciding ultimately for the career of a classical pianist and heading for New York’s Manhattan School of Music. After graduating, he further broadened his interpretive horizons under Dmitri Bashkirov at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofia in Madrid and under Ferenc Rados in Budapest. At that time, he began appearing on concert stages, helped by winning the famed Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. 

He built up the reputation of a world-class pianist known for advanced technique, intelligent interpretation, and careful reading of scores. As a soloist, he appears with the world’s top ensembles, in the 2023/24 season performing for example with the orchestras of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Zurich Tonhalle, the Orchestre national de France, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala and giving recitals at such venues as Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Konzerthaus. 

He is known for interpreting contemporary music, having even used the money from the Gilmore Artist Award to commission new works. He is associated in particular with the composer Thomas Adès, who composed his Piano Concerto for Gerstein, whose recording of the work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra received a 2020 Grammy nomination and won a Gramophone Award. In 2021 they together received the International Classical Music Award for Gerstein’s recording of Adès’s solo piano compositions and his music for two pianos, which they recorded together.

Another piano concerto dedicated to Gerstein was written by Thomas Larcher. That is the work that Gerstein was to have performed in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic in 2021, but because of measures to the limit the spread of the Coronavirus, the concert was only streamed, and the programme was changed to Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which will be heard again today at the Rudolfinum. Gerstein is tied to the Czech Philharmonic by years of collaboration dating back to 2012 when the orchestra was still led by Jiří Bělohlávek, and continuing with many more visits to Prague, performances on tour in Europe and America, and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos.

Gerstein is passing on his experience to piano students at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and at the Kronberg Academy. Under the auspices of the latter institution, he has made a series of online seminars with the title “Kirill Gerstein invites…”, debating with such important figures from the world of music as Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, and Sir Antonio Pappano.

“Today it’s our job—musicians and the public alike—to write the next chapter in music history together: to play and listen to the music of our time, always in search of works that will last”, says the conductor Alan Gilbert, who has been devoting himself systematically for years to performing the works of contemporary composers. He is active in Europe and the USA, and we find him in concert halls as, among other things, the chief conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra or (until 2017) the music director of the New York Philharmonic, and in famed opera houses. He won a Grammy for the recording of his debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera (with opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams in 2008).

A native of New York, he received the best musical education, studying first at Harvard University while adding variety to his studies with violin lessons at the New England Conservatory of Music. Later, he studied conducting at the Curtis Institute, which even conferred an honorary doctorate on him in 2010, and at the Juilliard School under the guidance of Otto-Werner Mueller. Professional engagements took him from the Cleveland Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera to the New York Philharmonic, becoming that orchestra’s music director in 2009. He was responsible for a major transformation of that already prestigious orchestra, especially in the direction of performing contemporary music, to which he devoted two whole concert series. Later, he pushed through a similar concept with Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, of which he became the chief conductor in 2019: a biennale titled “Elbphilharmonie Visions”, with performances of music by composers of the 21st century in the course of ten days in February 2023. Last season, Gilbert led the orchestra in the world premiere of the violin concerto The Elements written by five composers brought together by one soloist, Joshua Bell, the orchestra’s artist-in-residence at the time.

Besides truly contemporary music, for the promotion of which he received the Ditson Conductor’s Award from Columbia University in 2011, Alan Gilbert also enjoys devoting himself to music of the 20th century. He is an advocate of the works of Carl Nielsen, whose symphonies he has also recorded with the New York Philharmonic. “Nielsen’s music follows the tradition of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, but with peculiar Danish fingerprints. It is entirely accessible, fresh, compelling, and it simply speaks to people”, says Gilbert, who is convinced that the works of that Danish composer should appear more often on the programmes of the world’s orchestras. Although in 2014 the New York Classical Review declared that “No one plays Nielsen better than Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic”, Gilbert has also enjoyed success with the composer’s works elsewhere, such as with the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic. 

Besides holding permanent engagements, Alan Gilbert also collaborates with other important orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, besides appearing at the Metropolitan Opera, he has also introduced himself, for example, at Dresden’s Semperoper and at Milan’s La Scala. Since the spring of 2021, he has been the music director of the Royal Swedish Opera, where he performed Strauss’s Elektra and Wagner’s Parsifal last season. Recently, the King of Sweden appointed him as the Royal Court Kapellmeister. 

If the Danes were to celebrate a Year of Danish Music each decade, the chosen years would end with either the numeral “1” or “5”, corresponding to the years of the birth and death of Denmark’s most important composer Carl Nielsen. As a contemporary of Gustav Mahler, Pietro Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, and Eric Satie during the period of transition between Romanticism and the 20th century, he could compose very traditionally in the spirit of nationalistic traditions, but also quite modernistically. Nielsen chose an organic combination of two musical worlds relatively remote from each other: sweeping gestures of Romanticism that tend to reference the past, and avant-garde means of expression that are all the more surprising for their contrast with the traditional musical language of tonality.

After having graduated from the conservatoire in Copenhagen, Carl Nielsen began earning a modest living as a freelance musician for three years. He improved his violin playing to the point that in 1889 he became a member of the orchestra of the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. For 16 years, his position in the second violin section allowed him to earn a basic income, but the job was also a source of considerable frustration. He desired to travel and to experience cultural life in the great cities of Europe. Having been playing in the orchestra for less than a year, he was already able to get a several-month study scholarship, so he did not hesitate to take a leave of absence from his job and to set out on a nearly year-long educational tour of Germany, France, and Italy. In Paris, he met the Danish sculptress Anne Marie Brodersen (1863–1945), who at the time was undertaking a journey of discovery similar to his. They fell in love so passionately that they spent the rest of their scholarship travels as a couple, got married in Florence, and returned to Denmark as husband and wife.

Their family life together was filled with happiness and children, but also with the great artistic ambitions that they each had. When Anne Marie got permission to study rare reliefs at the Acropolis in Athens, Carl departed for Greece together with her, where they would leave their three children in the care of a kindly housekeeper and go out to learn about classical antiquity. Their idyllic lodging with a view of the Aegean Sea led Carl to the idea of creating a musical setting of the ancient myth about Helios, who moved the sun across the sky riding on a chariot drawn by four winged horses. Helios Overture, Op. 17, therefore consists of a single arch, gradually emerging with low notes played by the basses evoking the sea before sunrise: “Stillness and darkness — Then the sun rises to joyous songs of praise — Wanders its golden way — quietly sinks in the sea”, Nielsen explained in the first edition of the score. The work was first performed in Copenhagen on 8 October 1903 by the Royal Danish Orchestra led by its conductor Johan Svendsen. Nielsen himself led many more performances in Denmark and other European countries. When doing so, he surely must have recalled his time in Athens when it seemed to him that in composing, he was replacing his tonal system with something new. Whilst at work, he expressed this at the time in a letter to one of his pupils: “It’s burning hot now; Helios blazes all day long, and I keep writing in my new solar system.”

The combination of the traditional and the avant-garde in Nielsen’s oeuvre is best reflected in his Symphony No. 5, Op. 50 (1921–1922). For example, pitting a snare drum (or “military drum”) against an entire orchestra was something no European composer again attempted even long after Nielsen. At one point, the composer even asks the drummer to improvise “as if trying an all costs to halt the orchestra’s progress”. The symphony contains quite a few similar passages that sound raw and coarse. After the first rehearsals, some of the musicians marvelled at dissonances they had not heard before even in Schoenberg’s music. Unlike Nielsen’s last three preceding symphonies, his Fifth has no subtitle and, quite unusually, has only two movements. This corresponds to the composer’s idea, which he revealed in an interview before the premiere, which he conducted on 22 January 1922 in Copenhagen: “I’m rolling a stone uphill and using the strength within me to get it to the summit. And once the stone is resting quietly up there, there are forces bound up in it until I give it a kick, then the same forces are released, and the stone rolls back down again.” Then, he quickly added: “But you must not take that as a programme!” Similarly, the composer did not want to describe his symphony as being explicitly tied to the war. Instead, he viewed it more generally as a “division of darkness and light, the struggle between evil and goodness”, and the opposition of “dreams and deeds”.

The sculptress Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen created a monument in memory of her husband. It is usually rulers or military commanders who have equestrian statues, while such designs are unheard-of for artists. And yet one such monument is found in the middle of Copenhagen.

The popularity of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s works that we see these days was far from a matter of course in the century following his death. It is usual for a new artistic style to reject everything that had been popular before in order to promote its own views on creativity and beauty. The story of Mozart’s life appealed to the musicians of the Romantic period: his overly adult childhood, his financial troubles, and his premature death. But those same musicians viewed his compositions as too affected, even naïve, failing to reflect the real world, let alone a person’s inner life. However, if there was any work by Mozart that performers and audiences of the first half of the 19th century idolised, it was the Piano Concerto in D minor, K 466.

A large share of responsibility for this concerto’s popularity in those days lies with Ludwig van Beethoven, who often performed the work in public and wrote several cadenzas for it. There are also other cadenzas, such as those by Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann. The tempestuous beginning, the minor key (as one of only two of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos), and the contrasts between the themes are “Beethovenian” attributes that are already present from the first movement, and that is what so enchanted Beethoven.

With his Piano Concerto No. 20, Mozart began a series of six exceptionally fine works for piano and orchestra written in quick succession in 1785–1786, at the same time as The Marriage of Figaro, the Prague Symphony, and a series of important chamber compositions. Prague’s residents may have had a greater understanding of Mozart’s operas, but in those days the Viennese had a great appreciation for Mozart’s “academies”, i.e. concerts that he presented, performing his own new works. He played the piano part of his Piano Concerto in D minor at a concert held in Vienna at the casino “Zur Mehlgrube” on 11 February 1785. The ink had not yet dried on some of the orchestral parts that had been copied out at the last moment. The work was enormously successful, and not only thanks to the acclaimed performance of the soloist, conductor, and composer in one person. Mozart’s father Leopold was in attendance at the premiere, and he referred to it afterwards in a letter to his daughter Nannerl: “I heard Wolfgang’s excellent new piano concerto, for which the copyist was still writing out the parts at the moment when we arrived, and because your brother had to supervise the copying, he did not have time to play through the Rondo.”

Mozart wrote a concerto that makes great demands on both the orchestra and the soloist. Despite the first movement’s tempestuous orchestral introduction, the piano creeps in with a calm, lyrical theme that alternates with a fast passages played together with the orchestra—acting as protagonists, the soloist and the accompaniment maintain their intense dialogue the until the end of the first movement. The slow Romanze again begins with a lyrical theme played by the piano and repeated immediately by the orchestra, which then maintains the established calmness of tempo (but not calmness of emotions), while the piano part gradually fills in virtuosic passages. Even in the Romanze, Mozart, being a master of drama, is able to conjure up tension, only to return immediately to the opening lyricism. The real drama erupts with the third movement, formally a rondo. The main theme takes turns with highly contrasting passages, whether featuring pairs of woodwinds or alternation between the minor and major mode. Even the very end of the movement after a brief solo cadenza heads off for D major. It seems as if despite the unusual choice for the main key, Mozart wanted to reassure everyone that he had not lost his detachment or his amiability.