It may not be common knowledge that many of our best jazz pianists were classically trained. Yet, due to various factors such as racism and aspirations for freedom that jazz represented, many pianists made a migration to jazz. Their ranks include Oscar Peterson, who was taught classical piano by his sister, Daisy; Art Tatum, who was declared a superior pianist by Vladimir Horowitz; and Nikolai Kapustin, a Russian jazz composer-pianist who originally studied classical piano at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1950s but became an underground jazz pianist.
Migrations in the other direction are rarer, however, perhaps because of the rigorous technical requirements in addition to the conservatism of the classical music world. Kirill Gerstein, who played at Hertz Hall on Sunday under the auspices of Cal Performances, is one of the few who have made a successful transition.
In moving from jazz to classical, he may have overcompensated and deemphasized the spontaneity so important in jazz but often repressed and neglected in the classical world. His reading of J.S. Bach’s English Suite, No. 6, which opened the recital, was a case in point. While he was faithful to the score, I felt that Gerstein diminished the polyphony in it by overemphasizing the primary voice, leaving the counterpoints constrained.
I have long thought that Bach was the most important avant-garde “jazz” composer in history. His works contain elements of spontaneous improvisation that are either implied or explicitly indicated in the score, so it’s no surprise that many jazz musicians are drawn to perform Bach. Yet, in the suite’s highly chromatic and dissonant Gigue, which contains many harmonic and rhythmical collisions, such clashes could have been brought out and emphasized to illustrate the conflicts, yet in Gerstein’s hands indistinct voices glossed over them.
The solemn yet intense Sarabande was simply exquisite.
Nevertheless, the solemn yet intense Sarabande was simply exquisite. Bach provided a “double,” basically an improvisation on the original, and the contrast between them that Gerstein elicited was the extra dimension I sought to hear in the rest of the suite. However, even the “double” could have benefitted from more improvisatory elements.
Gerstein redeemed himself somewhat in Oliver Knussen’s Ophelia’s Last Dance (2010), a composition that Gerstein had commissioned, using funds from his $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award. Using an iPad placed on the piano as the score (modern technology for a modern piece, Gerstein explained), he led the audience into a dreamy rhapsody, opening with an impressionistic atmosphere, but then entering an intricate weave of jazzy dances peppered with extended dominant 13th chords, startling jabs in the “bleeding-nose” section of the keyboard, and even some ragged rhythms, borrowing from myriad jazz styles.
Crossover pianists such as Gerstein may be just the one to champion them.
Listening to his final work, Schumann’s Carnaval, which he played with velocity and gusto, I wondered if the traditional, conservative classical repertoire may be too confining for Gerstein’s brilliance and capabilities, coming as he does from such a background.
Coincidentally, there is a recent emergence of classical/jazz or even classical/pop fusion compositions that require the technical rigor of classical pianists, yet with the “groove” of jazz/pop musicians. Given Gerstein’s unquestionable success and recognition in both realms, I would love to see how he might approach such composers as the aforementioned Nikolai Kapustin, who has written as many as 20 piano sonatas and is still going at it. While his works are not strictly jazz compositions, they embrace the tonal vocabulary and spontaneity of progressive jazz, and I feel that crossover pianists such as Gerstein may be just the one to champion them.