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Kirill Gerstein

Piano Prodigy

Jewish pianist Kiri11 Gerstein was born
in 1979 in Voronezh, Russia, where he
attended one of the country's special
music schools for gifted children. He won
his first competition — the International
Bach Competition in Gorzuw, Poland —at
the age of 11. He subsequently won a full
scholarship to the Berklee College of Music
in Boston and, at the age of 14, moved to
Massachusetts with his mother to become
the youngest college student in the school's
history (his father later joined them).
Gerstein was the First Prize winner
at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein Piano

Competition in
Tel Aviv. In the
Rubinstein finals,
"I played both
Beethoven's Fifth
and the Tchaikovsky Concerto for the
first time noted Gerstein in a Symphony
magazine interview. "That was very, very
exciting. It was, you know, 'living on the
dangerous edge"
The pianist also was chosen to receive
a 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award, given
to young pianists who have demonstrated
significant potential to develop outstand-
ing performing careers as concert artists.
Yet early on, Gerstein told Symphony,
it was jazz that captured his imagination.
"I became interested in jazz when I was
around 8 or 9 years old, and I seriously
pursued it for awhile. I still play it some-
times as a hobby and I don't rule out that,
at a certain moment, it may come back
into my life.
"Studying jazz illustrated to me just how
many connections exist between playing
jazz and making classical music. Bach,
Beethoven —these people improvised;
they conducted; they composed. I think as

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

Memphis Belle

HBO's critically acclaimed series Big
Love begins its second season on
Monday, June 11. (The first season is
out on DVD.) Bill Paxton stars as Bill
Hendrickson, a Utah businessman
who has three wives, each of whom
has given him chil-
dren. Hendrickson
is a fundamental-
ist Mormon who
believes the main-
stream Mormon
Church erred when
it repudiated polyg-
Ginnifer
amy in the late 19th
Goodwin
century.
Playing Hendrickson's third and
youngest wife, Margene, is pretty
actress Ginnifer Goodwin, 29. A
friend at the Memphis, Tenn., Jewish
federation tells me that Goodwin, a
Memphis native, is Jewish and was
a bat mitzvah. As a matter of fact,
Goodwin went to Jewish summer

36

June 7 2007

much as we can emu-
late this multifaceted
involvement in music,
the better [it is] for us:"
It was at the
Boston University summer program
at Tanglewood in 1995 and 1996 that
Gerstein decided that classical music
would be his main focus. He moved to
New York City to attend the Manhattan
School of Music, where he studied with
Solomon Mikowsky and earned both his
bachelor's and master of music degrees by
the age of 20.
He made his major orchestral debut in
September 2000 with the Zurich Tonhalle
Orchestra and David Zinman. Gerstein's
orchestral appearances include perfor-
mances with the Israel Philharmonic;
summer festival appearances include the
Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival. He
also is an active chamber music player,
appearing in recitals with the violinist
Latica Honda-Rosenberg.
Gerstein will appear with the Detroit
Symphony Orchestra, under the direction
of Resident Conductor Thomas Wilkins,
in the orchestra's final classical concerts

camp with another current employee
of the Memphis federation. (Jewish
geography strikes again!)
A graduate of Boston University,
Goodwin has frequently appeared in
TV guest shots. Her biggest film role
was as Johnny Cash's first wife in
Walk the Line.

Smarties Hook Up

As reported in last week's Jewish
News, Sergey Brin, 33, the co-found-
er of Google and the 12th-richest
American, married his longtime girl-
friend, biologist Anne Wojcicki, also
33, in May.
Here are more
details: The San
Jose Mercury
News says they
Sergey Brin and
wed under a chup-
Anne Wojcicki
pah and that Brin
stomped on a glass "symbolizing the
[bride and groom's] connection to
their Jewish heritage."
However, the wedding was essen-
tially secular – presided over by a
friend, rather than by a rabbi.

Brin's father, a mathematician, and
his mother, an economist, could no
longer stand Soviet anti-Semitism
and left the former Soviet Union
with Sergey in 1979. Although not
religious, Sergey's mother once said
that she hoped her son would "find a
wife – preferably Jewish – who could
match him in wit."
By all accounts, Wojcicki is a
smart and witty woman. She is
the head of a start-up biotech
firm in which Google has invested.
Wojcicki's father is a Stanford phys-
ics professor; her Jewish mother is a
journalism teacher. Wojcicki's mater-
nal great-grandfather, a prominent
Russian rabbi, came to the United
States around
1920.
Actress
Natalie Portman,
25, and Saturday
Night Live star
Andy Samberg,
Natalie Portman
28, are dating,
and Andy Samberg according to
US Weekly. The

of the season 8 p.m. Friday, 8:30 p.m.
Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, June 8-10, in
Orchestra Hall at the Max M. Fisher Music
Center. He'll join DSO Concertmaster
Emmanuelle Boisvert and DSO Principal
Cellist Robert de Maine in Beethoven's
Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano.
Rounding out the concerts are Edgard
Varese's humorous Tuning Up and Jewish
composer Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3,
which includes an extensive quote from his
earlier, iconic Fanfare for the Common Man,
a moving tribute to American soldiers.
Tickets are $15-$69. (313) 576-5111 or
www.detroitsymphony.com .

Best Of Hest

A 2001 New York University grad with a
degree in communications and the son of
a mother who is a musically accomplished
cantor and a composer-arranger father
who is a music professor, Ari Hest has said
he regards his music as a form of therapy
to deal with his shyness.
The New York City native, who'll turn 28
on June 16, started his career while still an
undergraduate student at NYU and spent

pair met a year ago when Portman
hosted SNL and poked fun at her-
self in a mock gangsta rap video
that Samberg co-wrote. The video
was one of the best-received SNL
bits of the last five years: to see it,
go to http://www.pistolwimp.com/
media/42822/.
Samberg's writing partner, Kenan
Thompson, says, "If Andy is dating
Natalie, I'm extremely jealous."
A note of caution: Portman has
been falsely linked in press reports
to a lot of guys. Still, if they really
are dating, Portman and Samberg
would seem to be a pretty good
match. They are both sharp and
come from intellectual families.
Natalie's father is a prominent physi-
cian, and Andy's maternal grandfa-
ther was a well-known psychologist
who served for a time as chair of
the executive committee of the
American Jewish Congress.

Film Openings

The films March of the Penguins
and Happy Feet apparently haven't