Berklee Alumnus Kirill Gerstein wins prestigious Gilmore Artist Award
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/arts/music/07gilmore.html
Berklee Alumnus Kirill Gerstein is the latest winner of one of the arts world’s great windfalls: the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist. The award is music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants, and it is something of an anti-Van Cliburn Competition, a tacit rejection of the hoopla, bloodlust and horse-race quality of the international competition circuit. It is administered by the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo. Nominations are solicited; an anonymous committee sifts through commercial and noncommercial recordings, some of them surreptitiously obtained; committee members secretly slip into dozens of concerts - sometimes keeping to the balcony or hiding their faces with programs - to assess the performers, who are not supposed to know they are under consideration.
Berklee Alumnus Kirill Gerstein is the latest winner of one of the arts world’s great windfalls: the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist. The award is music’s answer to the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants, and it is something of an anti-Van Cliburn Competition, a tacit rejection of the hoopla, bloodlust and horse-race quality of the international competition circuit. It is administered by the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo. Nominations are solicited; an anonymous committee sifts through commercial and noncommercial recordings, some of them surreptitiously obtained; committee members secretly slip into dozens of concerts - sometimes keeping to the balcony or hiding their faces with programs - to assess the performers, who are not supposed to know they are under consideration.